Andrew MacKinlay: Has the Secretary of State reflected on the fact that there has never been a specific mandate from this House for the deployment of our armed forces and service personnel in Helmand? The Prime Minister always promised us that, if there were a significant deployment, it would have such a mandate. There is a serious democratic deficit in this case, and the Secretary of State needs to tell his NATO colleagues that he is under pressure in the House about it.
	It is now time that we took stock. When we deployed in Helmand, there was a ministerial statement. I confessed to the House that I had never heard of Helmand before, and I suspect that there were an awful lot of other people like me. It is now time that this matter were put to a vote in the House of Commons, to see whether there is an endorsement of this ongoing mission creep. We are putting more and more of our armed forces into Helmand, but NATO is not fulfilling its obligations.

John Hutton: I agree with a great deal of what the hon. Gentleman has said. We would not deploy additional forces to Afghanistan unless they had the right equipment to do their job properly. He has rightly drawn attention to the low number of helicopters that are available to support ISAF. We are working on that, as are our NATO partners and allies. The French-UK helicopter initiative is a small step in the right direction—it has yet to produce significant new assets but I hope that it will do soon.
	Although I agree with much of what the hon. Gentleman said, I caution him about drawing too many parallels between Iraq and Afghanistan. They are two very different countries, with very different security situations.

John Hutton: I agree that transparency in the figures is important. Every fortnight, we publish a series of figures, which show the extent of injuries and wounds to service personnel in active theatres. It is not therefore fair or reasonable to criticise the MOD for failing to provide an accurate scorecard on what is happening. We do not have a category of "life-changing injuries". Neither the statisticians nor the services have identified that as a meaningful definition. However, we publish comprehensive, fortnightly data, which deal with the extent of injuries and wounds. I am happy to draw the hon. Gentleman's attention to that, if he wishes.

David Hamilton: One of the biggest concerns that service personnel have when they return is that they and their families may face a year-long wait on the housing list. Will the Minister consider discussing with local authorities throughout the country the possibility of prioritising personnel returning from abroad—they are by some local authorities, but not all?

Dari Taylor: What attempts have the Government made to speak with Iran about the possibility of it signing, or at least seeing the value of, the nuclear non-proliferation treaty?

Afghanistan (Public Opinion)

Malcolm Bruce: What assessment he has made of Afghan public opinion on the International Security Assistance Force and UK military missions in Afghanistan.

David Drew: I hear what my right hon. Friend says, but even some of the more stable parts of Afghanistan, particularly in the north, are now beginning to look as though they may come under threat from Taliban or other insurgent elements. What guarantees can we ask for from the whole international community that a proper political process is underwriting what the military is currently trying to do? I am aware that my own regiment, the 1st Rifles, is there, as it has been on previous occasions. The military people need to have some knowledge that the political situation is getting better, not worse.

Malcolm Bruce: Some Defence questions ago, the Minister indicated that he was willing to respond to the number of forces who have been deafened in action, and I am pleased that some constructive discussions are going on between the Royal National Institute for Deaf People and the Minister's Department, but does he acknowledge that the United States gives both better equipment and much better support and compensation for servicemen and women who are deafened on active service? Can he ensure that we provide exactly the same quality of support as the Americans do for their troops?

Michael Fallon: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. Can you reassure the House that if, as rumoured, the Government are about to authorise the Bank of England to take further steps towards the printing of money, involving some £150 billion-worth taxpayers' money, that will be done only by a full statement to the House?

Greg Hands: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. May I raise with you a letter that has been written by my parliamentary neighbour, the hon. Member for Ealing, Acton and Shepherd's Bush (Mr. Slaughter), which has gone to tens of thousands of my constituents, outlining his reasons for his resignation as Parliamentary Private Secretary to the noble Lord Malloch-Brown? It is written on House of Commons Portcullis paper, which seeks to lend the authority of the House. In a letter to my constituents, the hon. Gentleman says that he has been their elected representative for 25 years and he is looking forward to fighting the next election as Labour's candidate for the new Hammersmith seat. He goes on to say:
	"My first duty as an MP is to you",
	but that is written to people who are not his constituents. May we have a ruling on whether the rules on writing to other Members' constituents are properly enforced in the House?

Northern Ireland Bill

Edward Balls: I wanted to make some progress and look at the individual reforms in order, but I am happy to answer that particular point. I look forward to hearing the hon. Gentleman's speech later on, and I hope that, if possible, he might be permitted to serve on the Committee. The reforms that we are introducing in the Bill, which build on the work that he has done for the Government in speech, language and communication, are very clear that we must strengthen our responsibility to young people going into custody and coming out of custody—in particular, through new responsibilities for local authorities in taking forward those young people's education and ensuring continuity of education afterwards.
	It is not normal on Second Reading to look forward to amendments, which are really a matter for the Committee, but in recent weeks there has been a debate, which has included contributions from the Special Educational Consortium, on ways in which we could strengthen this part of the Bill. I am happy to say that in Committee we will table amendments to make it clear that the obligations on local authorities to deal with young people in custody will be strengthened. In particular, although it is not possible for all the content of educational statements to continue while a young person is in custody, local authorities and the youth custody estate will have an obligation as far as possible to continue that special focus on those with learning difficulties while they are in custody. That, among other changes, will be very important in ensuring that these clauses have real, detailed teeth. We will also ensure that we say so in our guidance. Those issues will be debated in Committee, but today I am giving an assurance that we will take them forward with great seriousness.

Edward Balls: I was coming to that very point. If we want to raise school standards to ensure that every school can be an excellent local school, it does not just take good leadership and a willingness to intervene to drive change where necessary, but strong inspection and independent auditing of standards. As the House will know, in the spring, we will publish a report card White Paper. Through the Bill, we will strengthen school inspection by allowing Ofsted to produce an annual health check for all schools and to introduce a new, risk-based approach, which will mean that more attention is focused on schools that need more support, and that there is a lighter touch for higher performing schools. At the same time, building upon the immediate success of our new independent regulator of qualifications, tests and examinations, the Bill will provide Ofqual with the remit powers and independence that it needs. It is the job of Ofsted, with greater flexibility, greater powers and much greater independence, as a body reporting directly to Parliament, to ensure that we maintain the quality of standards across qualifications and over time. That is what the Bill will achieve, and I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will support it.

Edward Balls: I am not going to do that because I will leave it to Ofqual. It is an independent regulator of standards, it is independent of Ministers and it reports directly to Parliament. It is clearly its job to ensure that standards are maintained across qualifications and over time. We have to get away from this ridiculous, damaging and draining debate about dumbing down, when, whenever standards go up and teachers and young people have worked hard, some politicians and commentators jump up and say, "This must be because standards have been dumbed down." That is not fair, and it is not right. Rather than my making such assurances about standards, it will be much better when Ofqual, the independent regulator, makes such assurances to the public and to families. I am not going to second-guess its work. That is Ofqual's remit and responsibility, and it should get on with that work.

Edward Balls: No.
	I turn to a second point that is essential to the Bill. Strong discipline is vital for effective teaching and learning. Over the past decade, we have made huge progress on improving behaviour. In 2007, Ofsted rated behaviour as poor or unsatisfactory in a third of the number of schools of 10 years before. Following Sir Alan Steer's review in 2005, we have given head teachers the powers that they need to tackle bad behaviour. In the Bill, we are extending the powers that we have given school and college staff to search a pupil for weapons so that they may search also for drugs, alcohol and stolen property. Alan Steer asked for those reforms to ensure that teachers have the powers that they need so that they can get on and teach in the classroom.
	At the same time, we will legislate to build on the work that now involves pretty much all secondary schools, including all academies, working in partnerships to challenge poor behaviour and attendance. We will implement Sir Alan Steer's recommendation that all secondary schools, including academies and pupil referral units, should be part of those partnerships. As will be discussed in Committee, I intend to ensure that those behaviour partnerships report regularly to children's trusts on the work that they are doing together. That work will ensure that we keep exclusions down but that they happen when they are needed, that head teachers have the confidence to use their powers and that we intervene early to keep young people on the right track and ensure that they are not permanently or temporarily excluded from school.
	It is also important that schools have the support of parents. Strengthening the role of parents in schools is an important part of the children's plan, but we also want to ensure that when parents feel that their complaints are not being properly listened to, they have a proper right of resort. In our consultation, parents made clear their view that the opportunity to complain to the local government ombudsman would be welcome, and we are taking that step in the Bill. That is the right approach, and it will be used in a very small minority of cases. I hope that the whole House will support that reform.

Cheryl Gillan: The Secretary of State knows that on Friday I have the privilege of introducing a private Member's Bill—the Autism Bill—with tremendous support from all parties in the House. An integral part of that Bill is the requirement that local areas collate and share data on disabled children as part of children and young people's plan assessments, and take account of autism in the statutory guidance that will accompany the regulations. Will the Secretary of State undertake today that in Committee he will table the requisite amendments, under the Government's imprimatur, to the Bill that we are considering now so that we have legislation that allows local authorities to collate and share the information?

Angela Watkinson: A moment ago the Secretary of State referred to short-stay schools, which I assume will be taking over from the pupil referral units, for young people with difficulties who are not thriving in a mainstream school. They are termed "short-stay schools", but will he confirm that there will be no cap on a pupil's length of stay, so that they are not re-imposed on their mainstream school before they are ready or before they have made sufficient progress?

Paul Truswell: Apprenticeships obviously represent an incredibly important process, but it is important that apprentices should not be used as cheap labour. Will my right hon. Friend look into whether the exclusions to the minimum wage legislation that apply to some apprenticeships are really valid?

Edward Balls: I am happy to give that assurance. These are new apprenticeships in the public sector, and there will be 21,000 more of them from the 35,000 that we are going to deliver with £150 million worth of spending. That would not be delivered by the Conservative party: while we are expanding spending on apprenticeships next year, the Conservative party wants to cut it. That is the difference, so I am very happy to give the hon. Gentleman the assurance he sought.

Barry Sheerman: My right hon. Friend knows that the Children, Schools and Families Select Committee also stressed the importance of all children gaining access to information about apprenticeships. Will he clarify one part of the Bill for me: what does he see as the future for young apprenticeships—those for 14 to 16-year-olds?

Edward Balls: Just a few weeks ago, I met some young apprentices in Derby and saw how learning on a young apprenticeship as part of their key stage 4 curriculum was inspiring them to work hard for their maths and English exams as well. I think that young apprenticeships are brilliant and that they are a very important part of our pre-16 learning. I would like to see them expanded as part of our goal to get more young people staying in education up to the age of 18.
	What, then, is the position of Her Majesty's Opposition on all these important reforms? Far from supporting our drive to expand apprenticeships and far from bringing forward investment in school buildings to help to support our economy now, the Conservatives want to cut our school building programme and cut our investment in apprenticeships in the coming year. That is no surprise to us, because they continue to oppose all the major educational reforms in this Bill—and, indeed, in last year's Bill. Education, training or an apprenticeship for all to 18—the Conservatives oppose these things. They oppose our new diplomas, as they oppose our policy of fair admissions for all parents. On providing a children's centre in every community, the Conservatives want cuts. They oppose our National Challenge programme and they have undermined our academies programme.
	What can we expect to hear from the shadow Education spokesman? Will he tell us where the £4.5 billion of cuts to the school building programme will fall? I doubt it. Will he tell us more about half-backed gimmicks like his plan to force 11-year-olds who do not make the grade to stay on for another year in primary school? Probably not. Are we likely to hear more details about his Swedish model?  [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) is keen to be introduced to the Swedish model, but it is unfortunately not something that I can arrange for him today. Will he tell us about the billions of pounds in cuts that his Swedish model would mean? Will he tell us that there will be no intervention to raise standards in under-performing schools? Will he tell us that surplus school places will be springing up everywhere—not where they are needed, but where some have the loudest voices? Will he tell us that instead of local accountability, there will be a lottery for parents and a hugely centralised bureaucracy? No, he will not tell us any of those things.
	Instead, we will hear more of the hon. Gentleman's usual debating society rhetoric, without any substance at all. In recent debates, he has called me
	"an exam candidate who has not done his homework"—[ Official Report, 22 July 2008; Vol. 479, c. 683.]
	and
	"a gang member who wields a weapon but only harms himself."—[ Official Report, 11 December 2008; Vol. 485, c. 775.]
	It is a pity that he has not taken his own advice.
	Just a few years back, the hon. Gentleman wrote in  The Times:
	"The Conservatives' core problem is their failure to grasp that their introspective Westminster pranks, whether hyperactive plotting or hyperbolic attacks on the Government, only confirm the impression that they are playing a self-interested game rather than setting out a coherent alternative."
	Never has a truer word been said. He went on:
	"For the Conservatives to return to power, the party must be seen to have learnt from its mistakes, rejected the arrogance, cynicism and pocketlining of the Major era".
	For his punch line in his article, he said:
	"Ken Clarke is sadly ill-equipped to do that job. As John Major's tax-raising Chancellor, British American Tobacco's handsomely remunerated director, the euro's voter-rubbishing cheerleader and the tireless hammer of nurses and teachers, Ken carries more tainted baggage than a mule on Colombia airways."
	We all know that the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) likes a smoke, but to compare him to a Colombian mule seems a bit unfair, even for this shadow Cabinet.
	The fact is, as the hon. Member for Surrey Heath has said, that the Conservatives are still playing a self-interested game, rather than setting out a coherent alternative. The truth is that parents do not want a schools lottery, cuts to the school building programme or massive centralisation. They want every school to be a good school, standards to be guaranteed, discipline in the classroom, early intervention, more apprenticeships, and opportunity and excellence—not just for a privileged few, but for all. That is what will be delivered by the Bill. It is radical. It is right. It has public support. I commend it to the House.

Michael Gove: May I say how much I enjoyed the Secretary of State's speech, particularly the last few moments? There were some brilliant lines in there—uncharacteristically witty, if I may say so. I do not know who his new scriptwriter is or what he is being paid, but it is clearly worth it.
	As ever, the Secretary of State laid out his case with characteristic pungency and no lack of political verve, and I note his deliberate words of dislike for debating society rhetoric, so I shall seek to ensure that in what remains of our debate on Second Reading we concentrate on the detail of the Bill. What a lot of detail there is. This is a massive piece of legislation that covers a wide variety of areas. We hope to expose it to appropriate scrutiny when makes its way into Committee.
	Interestingly, the Secretary of State is already introducing amendments—on Second Reading—before we have even reached consideration in Committee. That provokes two questions in our mind. First, is the Bill, as it were, oven ready or is the Secretary of State running to catch up? What does that say about the competence and grip that he brings to his Department? Secondly, why is the Bill not in such condition on Second Reading that we know precisely what the Government intend to bring before us? Why do they need even now to say that they will table amendments in Committee, but cannot tell us what those amendments will be because they are not in the Bill? We cannot have effective scrutiny and an effective debate on Second Reading if there are, as the Secretary of State himself acknowledged, aspects of the Bill that he considers imperfect and believes he needs to change, but which he will not introduce until the Bill is considered in Committee.
	As I said, we already have a large Bill covering a wide variety of areas. Some of those are naturally ones where we believe it right to legislate and we sympathise with the Secretary of State's intentions, and indeed with some of the specific provisions in the Bill. First, I want to discuss the creation of Ofqual, which is the new regulator of exam standards. I say new, but it has already been in existence for some time. However, the Bill will put it on to the correct statutory footing for the first time. We wholeheartedly welcome the creation of this regulator. That is because the idea of setting up a separate exams regulator was proposed in the House by my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) and supported by my hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Damian Green). I believe that it has also received the support of the hon. Member for Yeovil (Mr. Laws).
	The idea of an independent regulator has widespread support because there is widespread concern about standards. The Secretary of State is quite right to say that teachers are better than ever, and he is quite right to acknowledge that our pupils are working harder than ever, but there is real concern about the rigour of the examinations for which this Government are responsible.
	The Royal Society of Chemistry—not an Opposition claque, but a respected scientific body—has said that teenagers who, when faced with today's examination papers, get 35 per cent. of the answers correct would have got only 15 per cent. correct if they were dealing with equivalent papers from the 1960s. British Council researchers—paid Government employees—have pointed out that candidates who would get a C when sitting an A-level examination in Hong Kong get an A here.
	Peter Timms of the university of Durham, an independent academic beholden to no one, has shown that a student who achieved an E in A-level maths in 1998 would have achieved a B in 2004. Duncan Lawson from the university of Coventry, another independent academic, has shown that students entering university in 2001 with a B at maths A-level displayed a level of knowledge that 10 years earlier would have been displayed by a student with a grade N, or fail. Indeed, students who failed the maths A-level in 1991—failed it!—performed better overall in tests of mathematical competence than those who secured a B pass in 2001.
	Two other academics, Jonathan Ramsay and John Corner, analysed maths papers from the 1960s to the present day. They found topics that used to be set for 16-year-olds in the old CSE exams cropping up in A-level papers. Their report observed that
	"finding areas and volumes using calculus, which used to be examined at 'O' level, are now examined in 'A' level pure mathematics... but it is the 'O' level questions which are harder."
	A team of mathematicians led by Professor John Marks also studied GCSE and O-level maths papers over time, from 1951, 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000 and 2006, covering periods of both Labour and Conservative rule. They found:
	"It is now possible to achieve a grade C in GCSE mathematics having almost no conceptual knowledge of mathematics. This is due in part to the simplicity of the questions and the decline of algebra, geometry and proof within the papers."
	Their report also observed:
	"It has become substantially easier to achieve a grade C since... 1987... In 1990 the percentage mark on the Higher Tier"—
	the decline pre-dates the arrival of Labour Secretaries of State: we are absolutely clear about that—
	"for a grade C was just over 50 per cent. However, in 2000 and 2006 the required percentage mark for a grade C had fallen to about 20 per cent; this mark could be attained by answering correctly the first four questions on Paper 5 and Paper 6".
	Indeed, we discovered that in 2004, GCSE students taking Edexcel's version of the exam could secure an A with a score of just 45 per cent., while one of 22 per cent. secured a C. Only 0.7 per cent. of the pupils who sat the exam failed to secure a C or better. The need for Ofqual is clear if we are to restore confidence in our examinations.

Michael Gove: I entirely agree with my hon. Friend. I am not in favour of sterile debates. Indeed, I am not in favour of sterile anything. I prefer fruitful debates, and fruitfulness and fecundity all round. I am glad to note that the Under-Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills, the hon. Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Mr. Simon), agrees with me. We are back to the Swedish model. I should point out, incidentally, that the Swedish model was first introduced to the House by the former Prime Minister, the former Member of Parliament for Sedgefield. May I say that I hope he is enjoying[Hon. Members: Steady!]her popularity in all parts of the House even now?
	My hon. Friend is absolutely right to say that Ofqual must be engaged in this debate. All the research I quoted earlier was generated by independent academics concerned about what was happening. Of course there are other voices, from Ofqual and the Government, that take a different view, and that is why it is vital that Ofqual leads the debate in order to provide the confidence that parents, teachers and all of us have a right to expect.
	In the interests of having that open debate, it is vital that we all know what our children are being asked in examinations. I am sure that, whether or not they have children going through the state education system, Members are concerned about the sorts of questions that are set in GCSE science, for example. We know that 16-year-olds sitting GCSE science are asked questions such as the following. They are told that for hundreds of years scientists have found information about the stars using one of four optionsit is a multiple-choice exam. Those four options are microscopes, space probes, seismometers or telescopes. Given that this information has been found for centuries, the answer should be obvious.
	It is also the case that in GCSE science papers people are told some answers in the questions. In one question, for example, they are told that it takes Jupiter 11.9 years to orbit the sun and then they are asked whether the time taken for Jupiter to orbit the sun is 1.9 years, 29.5 years, 65.4 years or 11.9 years. The answer is there in the examination paper. It seems to me that any of us [Interruption.] I happily grant that some of us are still capable of making mistakes even when the answer is staring us in the face, but the point here is that in order to have confidence in mathematical and science standards, we must be sure that the examinations our children sit stand comparison with the most rigorous in the world. It worries me how well other countries are doing in comparison with us: the Asian countries are pulling ahead of us, as are countries such as Finland. We need to be able accurately to ensure that exam standards are kept to a high standard over timeand, ideally, that we can hold our own with the world's best.
	It is worrying in this respect that the first intervention from Ofqual has been to force examination standards downwards. Last summer, one examination board, AQA, was specifically ordered by Ofqual to make an exam easier by lowering its pass mark for a C grade. It seems to me entirely wrong that the first intervention by a body that is charged with restoring and maintaining confidence in exam standards should explicitly be to make exams easier to pass by lowering pass marks.

Kelvin Hopkins: I am pleased that the hon. Gentleman has mentioned Finland as a good example of an education system that succeeds, because it has a thorough-going, 100 per cent. state comprehensive system. Will he advocate that that should be applied in Britain?

Michael Gove: I certainly believe that what we need is more good comprehensive schools. One of the striking features of Finland's education systemthe feature that is crucial to its successis the quality of people entering education, and specifically the quality of people entering primary and secondary teaching. Its teachers are drawn from the top 10 per cent. of graduates. In the spirit of bipartisanship, I should add that the Government's support for the Teach First programme, for example, and the efforts Lord Adonis made when he was at the Department to ensure that more people from top performing universities with high-level qualifications entered teaching were right. We will do everything we can do to support such steps.
	However, it is important not only that we get good people into teaching, but that we know that the exams are of a high quality, and, as the hon. Member for Yeovil pointed out, it is worrying that Kathleen Tattersall herself, the current chair of Ofqual, has said she is not clear about how standards should be maintained over time. The Secretary of State was reticent about the role that he has, but I understand that, under clause 138 of the Bill, he has the right to intervene to specify minimum standards. He can lay out in a memorandum of understanding to the chair of Ofqual exactly what he may require in any examination. Independence is important for any regulator, but it is quite right for the person properly elected and chosen as the Minister to lay out certain minimum requirements, and I hope that in the course of debate in Committee the Secretary of State or one of his ministerial colleagues will have a chance to give us further and better particulars on what exactly he intends to do to ensure that there are certain floor standards in examinations.

Michael Gove: I entirely take the Chairman's point. It is because I want to give parents a degree of confidence that I believe that it is right to create this regulator. We support that aspect of the Bill.

Michael Gove: It is interesting that the hon. Gentleman mentions universities, because I am worried by the extent to which universities are laying on remedial teaching for students taking mathematical, science or engineering degrees. For example, Imperial, one of our best universities, has had to lay on remedial lessons for some of the finest students from our state and independent schools. I am all in favour of increasing participation and getting more people into university, and I also believeas I said earlierthat students are working harder than ever. It is important that we do everything that we can to encourage and celebrate achievement wherever it exists, but it is also important that we are sure that an examination continues to be worth what it is commonly understood to be worth.

Michael Gove: Kazakhstan did better than us and I thought that was worrying. If the Minister is relaxed about that, it reflects curiously on him because he is normally a tiger on standards so I would have thought that he would be worried. In addition, as he knows, many high-performing European countries, including Flemish Belgium and Finland, were not in the study, and as he also knows a welter of other studies, including PISAthe programme for international student assessmenttell a very different story about what is happening. It is important to ensure that we have a degree of independent corroboration, which is why I support the introduction of Ofqual. It is natural that the Minister should choose statistics that flatter his Government's record; his predecessor the Minister for School Standardsnow the Foreign Secretaryalways quoted from PISA when it appeared to flatter the Government, but when PISA tells a different story, it is no longer flavour of the month or year in the Department. That is entirely understandable and I can appreciate why Ministers do it, but it is why we need Ofqual.

Michael Gove: Absolutely not. As well as welcoming the creation of Ofqual, I welcome the provisions on Ofsted and the Government's inspection regime. I specifically welcome the relaxation of the Ofsted regime for good schools and the more risk-based approach to their regulation. It is something we advocated 18 months ago and I suspect that a similar idea was coursing through the Government's bloodstream, so it is good to see it reflected in the legislation.
	I also welcome the Secretary of State's proposals for the reform of what we shall no longer call pupil referral units. Again, change and reform in the area was proposed by my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney, who made it clear that it was important that we have first-class alternative provision for children who have been excluded from school. Exclusion is a last resort but it is crucial as one of the weapons that heads need to maintain good order, and it is just as crucial that we have high-quality provisions for pupils who have been excluded.
	The suggestions being made around the Bill and in the Secretary of State's written ministerial statement last year seem to us to make good sense. It is important to go beyond local authorities and get alternative suppliers into the business of creating what will be the alternative provision of the futurethe short-stay schools to which the Secretary of State referred. Furthermore, in Committee, we shall do everything possible to support the Secretary of State's wish to improve the education of children and young people who are in custody.
	On the subject of looking beyond local authorities for organisations that provide a great service, we support the direction of travel in the Bill on child care. The private and voluntary sector provides much pre-school care and education to a high standard. The early years are crucial and we welcome the broad extension of the entitlement to free care for three and four-year-olds that the Government have brought forward. We specifically welcome the provisions in the Bill to ensure equity in funding between the maintained sector and the private and voluntary sector in the provision of nursery education and child care. It seems to us that a more level playing field is the right way to proceed.

Michael Gove: I mentioned the Secretary of State's partisan zeal earlier. Having found that one of his foxes has been shot, he is anxious to find another. However, if he had paid attention to what my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition said, he would not have gone down this particular route. I know that he is restless in his search for dividing lines. I remember the interview that he gave to the  New Statesman when he was just a humble Back Bencher, or at least a Back Bencher; he said then that he had had enough of consensus in education policy, and wanted to get back to good old-fashioned dividing lines. As I say, he is desperate in his search for one.

Michael Gove: As ever, my right hon. Friend is bang on the button. Talking of quangocracy will inevitably draw the attention of many hon. Members to the fountain of quangos created in the Bill, which I shall shortly turn to. First, I shall say a few words about apprenticeships.
	I welcome the Government's commitment to increasing the number of apprenticeships. Again, that idea was pushed first by the Opposition, most vigorously and eloquently by my hon. Friend the Member for Havant (Mr. Willetts), and also by my hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr. Hayes). My hon. Friend the Member for Havant has been arguing that we should refocus the Train to Gain budget in order to generate an extra 100,000 apprenticeships.
	I noticed that the Secretary of State said that the Bill was the first legislation on apprenticeships for 200 years overall, but in 1994 Lord Hunt of Wirral, who was then the Secretary of State for Employment, created the very idea of the modern apprenticeshipan idea that was derided at the time, when the Labour party was in opposition, only subsequently to be adopted by it. I am glad that the Government have seen the merits of Lord Hunt's proposal. It is only a pity that there is a gap between the rhetorical claims that they make for their apprenticeship scheme and the achievements on the ground.
	In 2003 the Prime Minister, as he then was not, said that there would be 320,000 apprenticeships by 2006. The reality was that there were only 239,000. Nothing abashed, in 2007 he said that he would double the number to 500,000, but the next year the total fell by 13,000. Figures from August to October in 2008 apparently showed an increase, but if we dig below the figures, we see that the increase is entirely due to an increase in the number of apprenticeships for people over 25. The number of apprenticeships open to those who were 16 to 18 or 19 to 24 fell.
	Overall in the past year we have seen a fall in the number pursuing level 2 apprenticeships, from 56,000 to 49,000, and a fall in the number pursuing level 3 apprenticeshipsthose that would be understood as full apprenticeships in European countriesfrom 27,000 to 24,000. Overall the fall is between 7 and 12 per cent. in the number pursuing apprenticeships. In construction, one of the areas where industry has been most engaged with the apprenticeship programme, the fall has been more than 30 per cent. in the past yearmore than 6,000 apprenticeships gone.
	I note that the Secretary of State said that there would be a new requirement on Building Schools for the Future's contractors to help fill that gap, but that provokes the question to what extent those contractors were falling down on the job beforehand. I suspect that many of those contractors were those who were shouldering their responsibilities to take on apprenticeships. It would be interesting to know the precise estimate of the additional number of new apprenticeships that will be created by the requirement that the Secretary of State is placing.

Edward Balls: The answer is 1,000 more apprenticeships by the end of next financial year.

Michael Gove: My hon. Friend makes a very good point. I am not against the additional provision of apprenticeship places as a result of placing the requirement on Building Schools for the Future contractors. I do say, however, that given the drop in the number of apprenticeships in the construction sector, the numbers do not begin to match the scale of what we need. My hon. Friend made that point very effectively.
	One of our other problems with apprenticeships overall is that we inevitably rely on the private sector to generate apprenticeship places. However, over the years it has become increasingly difficult for private sector concerns to supply those places. In the Green Paper on skills that my hon. Friend the Member for Havant produced just a few months ago, he helpfully listed every private sector provider's nine barriers to hiring apprentices. They included the complexity of the inspection regime, of the quality assurance scheme, of the registration scheme, of the certification scheme, of the funding structure, of the paperwork and of the self-assessment process.
	More and more people who wanted to provide apprenticeships were failing to do so, and that is one of the reasons why there has been the sad diminution of numbers that I mentioned earlier. We Conservatives do not want to add unnecessarily to that bureaucratic burden. As we scrutinise the Bill, our central aim will be to make sure that we do not add to the bureaucracy in such a way as to make it more difficult to do the right thing.

Michael Gove: It is an interesting issue. The hon. Gentleman will be aware of the facthe may lament itthat there used to be significant industrial concerns in the public sector that are no longer there. If he was alluding to the decline in the number of apprenticeships in many of those industries, I should say that that pre-dated privatisation. If he was alluding more broadly to a decline in support for apprenticeships, we have to look to a number of areas to discover why the private sector has reduced the number of apprentices that it is taking on. One crucial factor is the bureaucratic burden that many otherwise well intentioned private sector concerns now face.

Michael Gove: The figures come from the Government and the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee. I entirely associate myself with the words that the Select Committee Chairman has just uttered about the armed forces. I completely agree with him.
	I want to talk about further education; inevitably, one of the Bill's purposes is to implement reform or change in the FE sector. Further education has been a success for many years, since FE colleges were liberated from local authority control by a previous Conservative Government. Unfortunately, in recent years this Government have piled more bureaucracy on the sector through the Learning and Skills Council. As we all know, participation in further education has diminished.
	The Government's answer to more bureaucracy is another bureaucratic reorganisation. They are going to replace the Learning and Skills Council with the Skills Funding Agency and its chief executive, and a sub-quango, the National Apprenticeship Service, as well as with another quango, the Young People's Learning Agency. In the Bill and supporting material, the Government described the SFA as streamlined and the YPLA as slim. We all know that they will never launch a new quango saying, This is another bloated bureaucratic behemoth, but when they go to such trouble to say that it will be slim or streamlined they are clearly desperately worried about the new extent of bureaucratic compliance that they will be placing on all the organisations that have to deal with these quangos. Further education principals will have more bodies to report to, more circulars to read and more meetings to attend.

Michael Gove: Absolutely none, and I fear that this reorganisation may lead only to greater bureaucratic overload. Four further education colleges will now be in an unfortunate position whereby they find that local authorities will be the strategic commissioners of education for 16 to 19-year-olds. However, those local authorities will not have a free hand but will be tied by operating together on a sub-regional level. Their spending in operating at a sub-regional level will be monitored by the YPLA, they will have to negotiate the funding for those over the age of 19 with the SFA, and if they offer training for apprenticeships they will have to liaise with the SFA's sub-quango, the NAS. Even though the national LSC has gone, local authorities will still have to deal with nine regional learning and skills councils. That is because those nine regional councils, which replaced the 47 sub-regional LSCs, were created only five months ago, last September, and the Government cannot afford to get rid of them.
	While this massive bureaucratic edifice has been constructed, we have found on the ground that the real building of improved facilities for students has stopped because the Learning and Skills Council has placed a moratorium on construction. There will not be a Member in this House who does not have constituents at a further education college that is unaffected by that moratorium. I am myself in the unfortunate position whereby improved provision for sixth-formers in my constituency has been affected by that moratorium.

John Denham: I have resisted intervening on a number of tendentious facts and claims uttered by the hon. Gentleman in the past half hour, but will he withdraw his claim that there has been a moratorium on construction, and will he confirm that the full 2.3 billion of further education capital budget is going to be spent, as I have promised to this House? Future schemes are currently being assessed for the pipeline, but no construction has been halted. He should not come to the House and claim that it has when he knows very well that that is not true.

Michael Gove: I have listened to what the Secretary of State says, but he should visit Thomas Tomlinscote school in my constituency to explain why they have received correspondence telling them to terminate their plans for construction. If there is absolutely nothing to worry about, why has he appointed Sir Andrew Foster to investigate the situation? Why get a Sherlock Holmes to investigate quango crimes if no crimes have been committed?
	As well as being concerned about bureaucracy in the further education sector, we have similar concerns about children's trusts. We all want better inter-agency working and recognise that when it comes to child protection, welfare and support it is important to get all the organisations with an interest working better together. However, it is clear that children's trusts have not fulfilled the high hopes invested in them. The case of baby P proves that. The Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families took firm and effective action when the joint area review report was brought to him; I pay tribute to him for that. However, there was already a children's trust in Haringey and it did not prove to be the effective preventive institution that we would all have hoped that it might be.
	There is a potential for confusion in the way in which children's trusts are being set upfor example, over who will be the principal author of the children's and young people's plans. My hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs. Gillan), who is introducing the Autism Bill on Friday, has mentioned the crucial importance of clarity as regards the authorship of those plans. There is also some confusion, which is certainly reported by local authorities, about the division of responsibility between local safeguarding children boards and children's trusts. It is important when we bring forward new institutions and new ways of working that we are clear about the lines of responsibility. I hope that in Committee we will have an opportunity to provide a degree of reassurance to those people on the front line who are worried.
	On the subject of support for professionals, as the Secretary of State mentioned there are provisions in the Bill on discipline, too. We welcome the extension of powers to search students but we fear that they might not go far enough. We feel that the exact requirements to ensure that there are two staff of the same sex as the individual being searched; that only outer clothing can be searched; and that searches can be carried out only for specific goods, on reasonable suspicion and with proportionate use of physical force, might include too many restrictions. We believe that it would be more appropriate to give head teachers a general power that can be exercised for all materials that might be destructive of good order in schools. In our view, it is important that we give head teachers every weapon that they need in order to improve education.
	Above all, when we are considering improvement in the state education system, we need to recognise where improvement has come fastest in the past few years, and why. Improvement has come fastest in those schools that have benefited from the independence that the academies programme has brought. As the Secretary of State has acknowledged, improvements at GCSE in those academies that are at a stage where students are taking those examinations have been faster than in the rest of the state sector.
	The academies programme has been a success. We should have expected that, because its predecessor programme, the city technology college programme, was also a success. The 12 original CTCs now have examination results at GCSE that are better than the average level of all independent schools in this country. They are comprehensive schools and they are doing better than independent schools.
	It is because independent state schools and the academies programme have been so successful that it is so worrying that the voice of academies has been raised against the Bill. The Independent Academies Association has written to the Secretary of State and the Minister for Schools and Learners to say that it finds
	with growing dismay that those of us within the Academies movement have witnessed government's changing tack over the last eighteen months or so.
	The association's members are the people at the front line of improving education. They say:
	It appears that with every consultation, each missive and even new legislation from the DCSF, there comes further erosion of the independent status of Academies. Sponsors...Governors and Principals up and down the land are seriously questioning the long-term sustainability of the programme, when their efforts to positively impact on driving up educational standards and progress are being increasingly hampered by requirements to bow to the whims of quangos and to abide by additional regulations.
	The Bill, which creates new quangos and additional regulation, is specifically attacked by the association because it underlines the independence and autonomy that the association's members need.

Michael Gove: If hon. Members want to find out the view of the Independent Academies Association, they can read the letter that I have, which clearly states in gripping detail precisely why those who are responsible for driving improvement are so worried. One of the reasons why they are worried is that this Bill lacks the dynamism and coherence of previous legislation introduced by this Government. One of the tragedies of this Parliament is the fact that when Tony Blair introduced a Bill in 2005 to ensure a step-change in the provision of new, alternative schools to challenge complacent local authorities, he was unfortunately incapable of seeing that radicalism through. We need a radical change to the way in which our state education system works if we are to provide all students, and especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, the opportunities that they require. When radicalism was brought before this House in the shape of that Bill, the people who promoted it found that it was undermined by agitation on the Back Benches led by the right hon. Gentleman who is now the Secretary of State.
	It is a tragedy that what will almost certainly be the last piece of education legislation introduced by this Labour Government lacks any of the radicalism, coherence or passion of that earlier Bill. One of the sad epitaphs of this Parliament is that Labour, having come to the field of education with such high hopes and such good ideas, leaves it with a Bill that does nothing to meet the huge challenges that our young people face.

Gordon Marsden: I warmly welcome this Bill, which is very much a continuation of the Education and Skills Bill of 2008, not least in its expansive nature and its ambitions. I want to concentrate on the issue of apprenticeships and skills, and I do so because I have been involved with three major inquiries in my role with the all-party group on skillsone on information and guidance, a report on women and skills that we have just published with the National Skills Forum and a forthcoming inquiry on apprenticeshipsand because I was a member of the Select Committee that considered the implications of the Leitch report and which scrutinised the draft apprenticeships Bill.
	Skills and apprenticeships were at the heart of the policies needed before the recession, and that requirement should be even truer now. The social imperative embodied in this legislation is as important now as at any time in the past 10 years, and it should be linked to the issue of lifelong learning. Those issues are critical to my constituency in Blackpool, where the process of regeneration in a traditional low-skill, low-stay-on school setting needs to be transformed. Regeneration is about reskilling people as well as being a matter of buildings and structures, and the Bill needs to tackle both issues.
	It is right, therefore, that we acknowledge what the Government have focused on, what they have emphasised and what they have achieved. They have maintained a constant focus on the issuea process that has accelerated since we have had two ministries responsible for it and as a result of the increasing, vital co-operation between those Departments and the Department for Work and Pensions. The Government have rescued apprenticeships we should be in no doubt about that. In 1997, we inherited an apprenticeship figure of 75,000, but today we have a quarter of a million. We have made significant progress on completion rates. The creation of the national apprenticeship service, the 350 million that was promised for small and medium-sized enterprises under Train to Gain, which is very important in my constituency, the opportunity to study in bite-size chunks, the business improvement package, the 100 million for retraining and reskilling and the enormous success of the union learning fund and union learning representatives all show the persistent commitment of this Government, and particularly of the Secretary of State and Ministers past and present.
	I emphasise the critical importance of continuity. The Minister of State, Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr. Lammy), was an outstanding Skills Minister and of course now has responsibility for higher education. Such continuity is absolutely right, because what we deliver in skills at level 4 will be critical to our success.
	I do not say that there are not Opposition Members who have a passion for skills, apprenticeships and training. I know that many do, such as my colleague from the all-party group on skills, the hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr. Hayes), who is in his place, and the hon. Member for Havant (Mr. Willetts), who has just left the Chamber. The hon. Member for Bristol, West (Stephen Williams) has spoken passionately and constructively on the matter for the Liberal Democrats. However, to will the ends of success in apprenticeships and skills, one must also will the means. I am afraid that the Leader of the Opposition's ill advised playing with words and figures and his proposed 1 per cent. block have inevitably laid his party open to the charges that the Secretary of State so eloquently made this afternoon. The Opposition's lack of commitment to diplomas and the vocational route in the past, and the black hole that abolishing Train to Gain would open up, are not the ways forward.
	We need to place increasing emphasis on skills and apprenticeships for the post-16 cohort. Just as the profile of higher education students is changingthe average higher education student is now in his or her mid-20sdemography will ensure that the profile of those taking up skills and apprenticeships will change rapidly from 2010. We must pay due recognition to that, but we must also get the pre-19 situation right. That means getting information, advice and guidance right and emphasising the critical role of schools and teachers and the pivotal role of further education and sixth-form colleges. The question that we must answer in considering the Bill is whether it will give young people the skills and adaptability to gain jobs in an economic downturn and keep them, and the flexibility to go through a series of careers. Specifically, we must consider whether there will be clear, not clashing, pathways between diplomas, apprenticeships and higher education.
	Schools are not just about teachers, and clauses 212 to 227 contain welcome provision for the new school support staff negotiating body. The trade unions that represent support staff, Unison, Unite and GMB, of which I am a member, along with the TUC, are concerned that there should be national consistency in the agreements that are ratified. I ask Ministers to take that on board when they examine the details of the Bill. The role of support staff is as key to the success and ethos of a school as that of its teachers.
	The role of teachers in encouraging young people to go down the route of apprenticeships and skills is crucial, as is independent advice and guidance. Frankly, Connexions has hitherto not been able to provide that advice terribly well and has reached too few people. As the Skills Commission's report, Inspiration and Aspiration, stated, only 40 per cent. of young people have had one-to-one interviews under the current process. I therefore welcome clause 35, which will oblige schools to give advice on apprenticeships, but it remains the case that teachers need more guidance on both apprenticeships and diplomas. The Sutton Trust considered the matter recently and suggested that only a third of teachers felt that the 14 to 19 diplomas were useful in widening participation at higher education establishments. A recent survey by the Edge foundation showed that only 24 per cent. of teachers perceived apprenticeships as a good alternative to A-levels. That contrasted with much higher figurespercentages in the 40s and 50sfor parents, young people and employers. We therefore need a major push on apprenticeships.
	It has already been said that the Bill will deliver new structures, not least the young people's learning agency. However, how will that change the quality of the advice? Allister McGowan, chair of the National Institute of Careers Education and Counselling, has consistently warned about Connexions weaknesses and already wide variations in delivery. He and his colleagues will revert to that subject. It is important that the Young People's Learning Agency takes a firm hand in ensuring that there are national standards and that local authorities co-operate when necessary.
	I have mentioned the key role of further education and sixth form colleges. In Blackpool, I have two excellent examples, which are second to noneBlackpool and the Fylde college and Blackpool sixth form college. They promote vocational skills, especially in aeronautics, design and leisure. In the past 12 months, Blackpool and the Fylde college put 900 people through skills for life and employability programmes. It works with a local enterprise growth initiative to train local unemployed people in construction skills. All that is vital to Blackpool's regeneration, as is the capital build programme of 100 million to relocate the college in the centre of the town. It would be remiss of me if I did not take the opportunity to remind Ministers of the importance of linking future expenditure with regenerationof not only buildings but people.
	It is crucial that higher education institutions recognise apprenticeships and diplomas as proper qualification routes. Some areas are better at that than others. Fortunately in the north-west, the regional development agency is positive and active. We have the North West Universities Association and good links between the higher education and FE sectors. However, we need a proper framework to accredit advanced apprenticeships with the UCAS tariff. The Select Committee has already argued for that. Just as teachers need to learn swiftly about the importance of apprenticeships and diplomas, so do universities and admissions tutors, perhaps especially some of those at the older universitiessometimes, but not always Russell group universitieswhich have less experience of the older, non-traditional cohort.
	A false dichotomy is sometimes posed between basic level 2 and 3 and level 4 skills. We need both; we need different proportions in different parts of the countrythat is why the Select Committee's report on Leitch called for regional and sub-regional strategies. However, we know, not least from the projections that the UK Commission for Employment and Skills and its energetic chief executive, Chris Humphries, has produced, that more than 50 per cent. of all job demand in the next eight to 10 years will be for high level skills. There must therefore be a much clearer link and mapping between diplomas and apprenticeships. The main message is that we need both to be recognised and accepted rapidly.
	Apprenticeships are about principles, not only the mechanics of delivery. Equality and diversity must be built in, especially for non-traditional groupswomen, ethnic minorities, people with disabilities and younger adults. That means reconsidering flexibility in some of the guidelines for statutory rights to apprenticeships. The Open university has done that for years with its admission of students. If such flexibility is good enough for the Open university, which produces wonderful results, it should be reconsidered for apprentices.
	Neither skills nor apprenticeship policy can be coherent without considering older workers, and I give the Government great credit for recognising that, and for what has been done so far. Indeed, the new adult advice and careers services are an important step forward. However, as with younger workers, the National Institute of Careers Education and Counselling has argued that an effective mature adult apprenticeships programmes is not the same as a programme that is suitable for first-time entrants. Recognition of prior learning experience, as on the OU model, and stress on the modular will be key, as will the new rights to request training and encouragement.
	We need also to be clear about the rights to apprenticeship, especially in a recession. Who will pick up the slack? Public sector apprenticeships are important, but we must also consider the role of universities, which will take on and, frankly, shelter apprentices who have been let go by business because of their failings.
	There is already good practice among older employers such as BT and British Gas, but the Government have to use every lever to ensure that public procurement brings with it apprenticeships, so I very much welcome what has been said about that today. We need to boost productivity, not just employability. There are long-standing skills challenges. Figures suggest that about 60 per cent. of health and social care job demand in the next 10 years will be in professional and personal services and that 60 per cent. of construction job demand will be in the skilled trades. Again, however, those are precisely the sectors from which 30 to 40 per cent. of the work force will retire in the next 10 years. We have to address that.
	In particular, we have to address that problem among certain groups. I want to talk again about the importance of women. Closing the gender skills gap, the report that the Skills Commission has just published, is all about that. It covers everything, from challenging role models and stereotypes in schools and colleges to linking work with Department for Work and Pensions policy. That is particularly important in respect of the role of carers and making the allowance available to people on courses for more than 21 hours a week.

Gordon Marsden: I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. If we were starting from point zero, we might take a different view, just as we might with respect to the funding of academic students, too. However, we are where we are. I support the moves that the Government have made so far. I would like them to move further, but that has to be done on the basis of balancing the needs of younger learners and the available funding.
	We have talked quite a lot about statistics today, but this debate is all about the life-changing effects on individuals. When I think about women and skills, I think of the woman from the Mereside estate in my constituency whom I met at the recent opening of a children's centre. She had taken her children through Sure Start, in which she had been a volunteer. She then returned to a further education college in her late 30s to train as a primary school teacher. She had got through, but the structures need to be made much easier, to encourage many more people to do so. That is also true for marginalised groups, such as workers displaced by recessions and those returning to the labour market. I am glad to see the commitments, which the Secretary of State has underlined this afternoon, in clause 47 on young offenders' learning.
	None of us can leave aside the recession. What are we training people for? The key task for the agencies created out of the Bill will be to refocus learning opportunities around soft skills and give people credit, in both senses of the word, for training that does not always have to lead directly to employment. That has consequences for Train to Gain. It means that more flexibility will need to be built into Train to Gain, to ensure that many more people not now employed can access training and ongoing education, and that, for the time being, the Government, not the employer, will increasingly be the co-ordinator and sponsor for ongoing education and training.
	We have to be careful, in the drive for skills and reskilling during the economic downturn, that the case for lifelong learning is not lost. Even with the imperatives of skills funding, informal learning can still loom large. The sort of skills that older people require if they are moving from a low-grade job or returning to work are often clustered. They are not linear; they are gateway skills to do with developing self-confidence, time-keeping and office skills. Such skills will not always be gained from job-based qualifications. The Government, as well as employers, have to recognise that the development of skills accounts, the Government's laudable initiative to revive the original intention of individual learning accounts, must include funding incentives for non-instrumental learning, as the City and Guilds national learning bank proposals say. As our Committee said:
	Skills Accounts that merely became an...accounting exercise, listing achievements or entitlements...would be sterile and quite inadequate to address the issues...Leitch highlighted in his Report.
	We have to think about the contribution of adult learning above and beyond the world of paid work. Being able to use the talents and commitment of people from the third age, especially in the third sector, will be an essential ingredient of voluntary and community work, and, where possible, that should be funded.
	As we recover from the economic downturn, it is also going to be necessary to reskill people with green credentials, and not just through capital expenditure programmes. As Chris Humphries has recently emphasised, skilling will have a big impact on hundreds of thousands of people. The TUC's new pamphlet on unlocking green enterprise highlights the fact that this is not just about degree levels but about the installation and maintenance of renewable energy technologies, which will require much more modest qualifications.
	We should also look at what is going on in the USA. Barack Obama has produced an ambitious programme, and there have recently been proposals about how those policies will affect people there. For example, a report called Job Opportunities for the Green Economy makes the point that wind farm projects will create jobs for sheet metal workers, machinists and truck drivers, while increasing the energy efficiency of buildings will rely on roofers, insulators and electricians.
	This is all about practical politics, and about bringing together not only skills but aspirations. The title of our Select Committee report on Leitch was Re-skilling for recovery. I believe that, with enough blue-sky and green-skyif I can put it like thatthinking, we can deliver skills and educational fulfilment for people of all types and ages. The Bill, with its focus on skills and training, can be a key vehicle for delivering that.

David Laws: I would like to start where the Secretary of State began, by paying tribute to Lord Dearing and the work that he did, during a long period in education, on curriculum reform, higher education and, more recently, modern languages. I would also like to thank the Minister and his team for meeting me and my hon. Friends the Members for Bristol, West (Stephen Williams) and for Mid-Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke) to discuss the Bill and its later stages.
	When we had our meeting, however, the Minister did not mention that he was already in the process of amending his own Bill. We have heard from the Secretary of State today that a number of amendments are already in the offing. I think that at least one of them might emanate from Barnardo's, although I hope that the Minister will correct me if I have got that wrong. It would be useful to know, either now or at some stage before the debate concludes, how many amendments there are already, particularly on special needs, and when members of the Committee and Members of the House can expect to be made aware of them, so that we can avoid pursuing issues that the Government may already have addressed. Perhaps the Minister could deal with that question later in these proceedings.
	I should also like to thank all those outside this place, such as Barnardo's and others, who are already busy scrutinising the Bill and proposing a series of amendments and adjustments to it. In my view, they do not have a particularly enviable job. This is a very long Bill, with 265 clauses, and it is not a particularly exciting Bill. If it is going to be the final education Bill of this period in office for Labour, as I suspect it will be, it will mark Labour's leaving with a whimper rather than a bang. With the exception of the proposals on apprenticeships, it seems to be a rag-bag of different proposals with no common theme other than, in many cases, that of centralising power and increasing the level of bureaucracy.
	The Bill is particularly deficient in respect of tackling some of the continuing, entrenched disadvantages and inequalities in the education system that are manifested in the enormous gap between the performance of those from deprived neighbourhoods and those from more affluent areas. It is still the case, for example, that about 85 per cent. of white boys from poor families fail to reach the Government's benchmark of five good GCSEs. We also know that a majority of schools in the poorest areas fail to get more than 30 per cent. of their pupils to reach the five good GCSEs target.
	I had hoped that the Government would provide a greater sense of momentum and vision through the Bill. I had hoped that they would accept the proposals for a pupil premium developed by the Liberals and others to target disadvantage and that they would raise funding levels and effectiveness to reach the people who have been and continue to be left behind. I wanted to see those proposals in the Bill.

Kelvin Hopkins: The hon. Gentleman dismisses much of the Bill as of little consequence, but does he not accept that the proposals for sixth-form colleges are radical and could leadwill lead, I hopeto the development of many more sixth-form colleges, which might well be seen as highly significant in future?

David Laws: We will see in time how radical they really are. What I am suggesting is that if we look at the real challenges this country's education system faces and acknowledge the huge number of youngsters, particularly in lower-income groups and among those with special needs, who are being left behind in education, we find precious little in the Bill that will make much difference to them in two, five or even 10 years' time.
	What I would saythe Government have been a little reticent in acknowledging this today, despite the Secretary of State's teasing by his opposite number on fundingis that the Government are moving into a period in which educational budgets will be much more restrained. Indeed, after 2011 we will probably see an end to the Government's pledge made a number of years ago to expand the education budget as a proportion of GDP, so it will be much more challenging to deliver the improvements that the Government have committed to and that many of us would like to see.
	We will have plenty of time in later stages to scrutinise the myriad detailed and, in many cases, quite small proposals in the Bill's 265 clauses.

Graham Stuart: I am grateful for what the hon. Gentleman has just said, because it gives the lie to what the Secretary of State said to the House earlier, when he suggested that exam boards are not interested in the new regulator having teeth when that is precisely the opposite of the truth. They are committed to high standards because they have an interest in that currency. It is the Government who perhaps have an incentive to go in the opposite direction.

David Laws: The hon. Gentleman is exactly right. The Secretary of State seemed to get the wrong end of the stick when he responded earlier. He appeared to be under the illusion that the exam boards were complaining that the new body would be too powerful and would hold them to account too effectively, but they have precisely the opposite concerna concern that may be reinforced by the somewhat ambiguous responsibilities that the Bill gives Ofqual. Clause 125(4), for instance, gives it a duty to promote public confidence in qualifications. That leads us, in the context of some of what it has said recentlyincluding the views that it expressed about the key stage testing fiascoto question whether it will be an effective watchdog, or will see its role as that of a cheerleader.
	The Select Committee has made recommendations which, in my opinion, could make a real difference to whether Ofqual discharges its responsibilities effectively. The Committee's report makes absolutely clear its view that not only should Ofqual be a fully independent organisation, but it should have the power to carry out standardised sample testing for the purpose of monitoring particular cohorts of students so that, over time, we can see what is happening to educational standards without the results being distorted by teaching to the test, or by changes in the ease with which certain qualifications can be gained.
	The Secretary of State chortled when I raised concerns over how Ofqual would discharge its responsibilities. In particular, he chortled at a sentence to which I referred and which, in fact, came from the Government's response to the Select Committee report. It is worth putting on record precisely what the Government's response was to the proposals on sample testing. They said, in July 2008:
	we do not accept that sample testing is necessary or desirable. In any case, Ofqual's role is not to monitor education standards as a whole; it is to regulate the qualifications and assessments which are one of the means by which those standards are measured.
	That is a very interesting observation. It raises questionsthe hon. Member for Surrey Heath nodded when they were mentioned earlierabout the extent to which we can rely on existing qualifications for judgments about educational standards as a whole.
	I suggest that we need Ofqual to have precisely the powers that the Select Committee envisaged to carry out its own monitoring of educational standards without relying on qualifications which, particularly over recent years, have been persistently changed in a series of ways. No doubt they have often been changed with the best of intentionsto help youngsters to thrive in education, and to provide them with a testing and exam system which may in some cases be more meaningfulbut in most cases the changes have had the effect of apparently improving standards; and that, alongside the Government's targeting system for education results, has had a very strong effect in pushing schools and youngsters into qualifications that may often be considered likely to help to deliver those targets.
	Although the Secretary of State indicated earlier that he would stand back from the whole debate about standardsthat he would not make any grand claims, and that he would leave all this to Ofqualwe have also seen, in paragraph 50 of the Government's response to the Select Committee's report, the following very impartial assessment of the standards debate:
	Thanks to... regulatory scrutiny, we have every confidence that standards are being maintained and that tests are a true measure of learners' attainment.
	It seems that the Government, while pretending to be in favour of some sort of impartiality on standards, have already taken a clear position in the standards debate, arguing that much of the evidence cited earlier is apparently not accurate.
	In scrutinising the Bill, we shall want to spend a fair amount of time examining the Ofqual proposals. We shall want to consider whether the existing rather weak proposals can be turned into something far stronger, and can produce the sort of education standards authority that we have discussed over the last couple of years: an authority that would be more independent of Government, would be able to discharge the types of functions to which many of the exam boards have referred, and would be empowered to make its own judgments about educational standards without relying only on the existing qualifications.

David Laws: I believe that the problems so far have included not only the degree of independence, or perceived independence, but the expectations that there have been on those bodies and the powers they have had to carry out their functions. Even in the proposals the Government are bringing forward today, there is not really the expectation that Ofqual will be doing a serious job and will be given the resources and discretion to assess what is happening in terms of educational standards. It is in danger of looking as though the Government simply want the slightly more independent body of Ofqual to rubber-stamp the exam results each year, so that it is somebody who is apparently independent, rather than Government Ministers, who will have to appear on television in August to explain why the results have gone up. The Minister for Schools and Learners will then be able to stay away in whatever exotic destination he is holidaying in, instead of returning to answer questions on the airwaves.
	That brings me to a second area of concern, which I think would be shared by almost anybody who is familiar with Labour policy on education and public services over the last decade or so. It relates to the extent of central control and the tendency to introduce additional burdens of bureaucracy, often unnecessarily. The Association of School and College Leaders says in its representations that it is particularly concerned about the extra powers the Bill gives to the Secretary of State. It says these powers increase the centralisation policy and have the potential to undermine the capacity of school and colleague leaders and governing bodies to make decisions appropriate to their local circumstances. I agree with that; in many areas, a lot of additional central control is being given to the Secretary of State, and we will return to that later when we discuss improvement powers in relation to schools. There is also a great deal of bureaucracy in some of the new proposals. Many of them are no doubt being introduced with the best of intentions, but there is a real danger that they will become a bureaucratic nightmare of considerable proportions.
	I shall start with the new complaints procedures, which remove the Secretary of State's power to have to get involved in messy and difficult appeals. It is one of the few areas where the Secretary of State is actually giving something upand it is possibly the one power he would want to give up. That power will be handed over to a new appeal mechanism, which is essentially an ombudsman function. There is a major concern that that could lead to a proliferation of complaints, not all of them well grounded, and a need for schools to increase enormously the amount of monitoring and collecting of evidence that relate to cases that could emerge through this ombudsman process. The National Union of Teachers says in its representations that there is concern among teachers and head teachers that this provision is at best unnecessary and at worst may further complicate existing complaints structures. The ASCL says in its comments on the Bill that guidance about what constitutes a good complaints policy is the best way to deal with the relatively small number of cases where school complaints systems are not working well. It suggests that the proposed complaints service has the potential to be expensive and bureaucratic and that, as it will have an interest in justifying its own existence, it may be liable to increase, rather than diminish, whatever problems there may be. We will therefore want to look very closely at these proposals during the passage of the Bill.
	We notice that in clause 194, which describes some of these powers, what is a qualifying school includes
	a community, foundation or voluntary school...a maintained nursery school...or a short stay school,
	but that academies are apparently not included. Can the Minister clarify now or later whether academies will be exempt from this complaints process and, if so, what complaints process will relate to them, and what is the justification for leaving them out of this process?
	Another Government proposal is the right to request time off for training. That, of course, either sounds wonderful or probably already exists in many businesses. However, when we look at the Bill in detail, we will have to consider how this right and the appeal routes that will be given to employees will work in practice. The Bill lists a whole series of what are essentially opt-outs for employerscircumstances in which they would find it difficult to give this right to time off for training. Most of them require an enormous amount of discretion and judgment, and it will be interesting to learn how the Government envisage some of these proposals working in practice, and what the scope may be for an increase in bureaucracy and appeals, and, perhaps, in cases being brought where there has been a breakdown previously between employer and employee.
	Also on the bureaucratic and centralising burdens in the Bill, there are some important proposals on powers to search, which the hon. Member for Surrey Heath has touched on, and the important issue of reporting a physical constraint. We would want to make sure that policy on the latter strikes a sensible balance between the requirement to report incidents that are sufficiently serious while avoiding being so onerous that it creates impediments to sensible behaviour within schools. In relation to the powers to search, we and a number of the teaching organisations share some of the concerns expressed by the hon. Gentleman earlier that the way in which the Bill grants these powers leaves out certain powers to search for other items, which any head teacher or governing body would probably want to be able to exercise. Therefore, the issue is whether it is right to grant a more generalised power that allows for a greater degree of discretion, or whether the Bill should allow for some of the other areas that have already been identified by bodies outside this House.
	Finally, I turn to school accountability and improvement. Under this Government, there has rightly been a great deal of concern about schools across the country that have not been performing to the level that is possiblethat has been demonstrated to be possible in areas where there is a similar, and often particularly challenging, catchment. I commend the Government for having not been willing simply to assume that such schools, often in deprived areas, should automatically be sentenced to achieve poor results. I can also understand why the Government have not in the past been willing to allow mechanisms of accountability that should have been exercised through local authorities, because it is clear that in large parts of the country over a very long period of time some local authoritiesquite often in Labour areas and where Labour has been in power for long periodswere simply not discharging those responsibilities effectively. Indeed, in many cases those local authorities had themselves got into a mindset where they had a set of low expectations for the young people in their area because of the types of household and levels of income that they came from.
	Over the past 10 or so years, we have had an increasing range of Government policies designed to intervene and deliver improvements. They are well intentioned, but they have often been counter-productive, as were some of the announcements on the National Challenge programme, which dubbed schools failing even when in some cases they had been converted into academies, were improving rapidly and had very good value-added. In some of those cases we know that the ability of those schools to improve was made more difficult because of their having been designated by the Prime Minister as failing schools: they lost pupils who were previously going to attend and they lost staff who were going to apply to work in them but who, when they read in the local newspapers that the schools were at risk of closure, decided not to apply there.
	Our education system needs a more coherent mechanism for holding local authorities and schools to account, and then a proper means of intervention. At the moment, we just have a complex muddle between local and central responsibility. The Government say that they want local authorities to be the commissioners for education services, but they do not really believe in the ability of local education authorities to perform that role. We also have a vast range of different mechanisms to be used in a very arbitrary way to deliver school improvements.
	The Bill repeats many of the errors that we have seen over the past 10 years. The Local Government Association, for example, notes how the Secretary of State will now take additional powers on school improvements and forcing notices of improvement to be issued, even when local authorities are being proactive and have other proposals for improving education in those areas. We know that the Government's response to the expansion of the academies programme has not been to try to find some mechanism through which the academies can become locally accountable to the local authorities, which are supposed to be the commissioners. The response has been simply to acknowledge that Ministers cannot ultimately control an academy programme of 200, 300 or 400 schools and to set up another agencya mini local authorityto do that job for the Government and local authorities. That confirms the view that the Government still do not trust local authorities to be effective commissioners and to deliver change.
	The Liberal Democrats would like to see a proper role for local authorities in holding schools to account and a proper devolution of power, not only to schoolsso that they can exercise some of the powers that have been decentralised to academies but not to other maintained schoolsbut to local authorities in their oversight of school standards, with appropriate scrutiny of their performance by Ofsted or an education standards authority. Such an authority should hold not only schools and pupils to account, but local authorities as commissioners of services. Instead, we have from the Government another set of arbitrary measures that will no doubt be replaced in the fullness of time by other arbitrary measures or changes made by whatever Government we will have in the future.
	The Bill is a hotch-potch of different measures, thrown into a long piece of legislation designed to give the impression that the Government still have some sort of agenda for education. However, it is sadly lacking the fundamental changes that could make a difference in addressing the major concerns about the education system that are actually shared by all parties.

Barry Sheerman: I wish to add my voice to those who have mentioned the sad death of Lord Dearingor Ron, as I knew him. His contribution to education in this country was immense, but what stands out in my mind is his consideration of the future of higher education before the 1997 election. His report achieved all-party agreement and higher education would have been profoundly different without it. More recently, my Committee has been considering testing and assessment, is concluding an inquiry into the national curriculum and will go on to look at inspection. Ron Dearing's name runs throughout all those issues. The education sector will be poorer for his loss.
	On a lighter note, Ron's sense of humour was amazing. It was a sight to behold him and Ken BakerLord Baker, I should saygoing around together to promote university technical colleges. That was a lovely last campaign for Lord Dearing, and we shall miss him.
	I turn now to something that would have been of great interest to Ron, and that is where we are after nearly 11 years of Labour education policy and this latest Bill. As Chairman of the Select Committee on Children, Schools and Families, I have noticed how some colleagues complain about how disgraceful it is that we have new legislation that will take our mind off the job of running schools and upset people because the quango structure will be changed. On the other side are the people asking why the Government do not provide more direction or make more high-profile, sweeping changes right through from early-years, pre-school education to higher and adult education. We have to achieve a balance, as all Governments try to do.
	As I have said in previous Second Reading debates, three pillars of reformtesting and assessment, the national curriculum and inspectionare associated with the period between Baker and Balls. Those reforms have now been in existence for 20 years and it is therefore a good time to reflect on them. Some of the elements of the Bill do that, although it is somewhat a catch-all Bill.
	I shall start with apprenticeships. In this case, the Government gave both my Committee and the Business and Enterprise Committee the opportunity for pre-legislative scrutinyit was all that we had time for. It was an experiment for the two Committees, which worked for the most part blind to the other's work but came to very similar conclusions, which is not a bad recommendation. Broadly speaking, we welcomed the proposals on apprenticeships. All of us worried about the ambitiousness of the Government's targets, and whether they could be deliveredespecially as by the time we wrote our report, we were in recession, a time when it becomes ever more difficult for the private sector, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, to think about taking on more apprentices. Those of us who have been here for a long time remember the collapse of apprenticeships under a previous Prime Minister. We had wonderful apprenticeship schemes in some of the premier companies in this country, but they fell away, and it has taken a long time to get back to that quality of training and to rebuild the apprenticeship infrastructure.
	People can get carried away by the term apprenticeships, and the Committee considered the issue of quality control. Some of us with constituencies that still have a strong engineering baseas I do in Huddersfieldassume that an apprenticeship lasts three or four years and is intensive and of high quality. It is paramount that when a person finishes an apprenticeship, they not only have a good qualification that will more or less provide them with a career for life, but are well remunerated. That is true of some apprenticeship schemes, and those in engineering seem to set the gold standard. Many apprenticeships are short term nowadays, lasting as little as a year, so they are rather different. Some are not served with employers but are programme-led.
	We drew quality control to the Government's attention, because we need assurance that qualifications are of good quality and lead to well-remunerated employment. Both Select Committees said, For goodness' sake, make sure that in every school the apprenticeship option is brought to the attention of young people coming up to 16. Absolutely. Why not? It provides a wonderful opportunity that is better suited to the talents of many young people than staying on at school until they are 18 and then going to university or seeking employment.
	Apprenticeship is a good option if it is the right apprenticeship for the young person. I believe that young people should be told what the career they are entering will bring them as an income. That was one of the things I wanted to add to our report although we did not include it. They should know how often on average they would need to change jobs as a hairdresser or in retail or distribution, where the training is much shorter but incomes are much lower. The assurance of the good life in some sectors, based on an apprenticeship, is not what it is in others, so people need better knowledge of the career steps beyond the short apprenticeships offered in some sectors.
	The Minister's response to our pre-legislative report was rather late. We reminded him that it was due when he was giving evidence to the Committee a few days beforehand and it arrived in the nick of time so that it could be attached to the documents for this debate. Our challenge to the Government is that there can never be a better time to train than during a recession. If we do not have training during a recession, we might as well give up on the commitment to train. This is when we have to train; the Government have to become more active and recognise that the private sector will be more reluctant, unless it is given inducementsunless it is made beneficial for small, medium and large companies to take on apprentices. When companies are finding it difficult to make ends meet and to obtain bank loans to continue production, there must either be generous help for the private sector or public sector apprenticeships will have to be pulled into play in a way that we have not considered seriously for a very long timeif ever.
	As most of us know, the major employers in constituencies such as mine 30 years ago were household namesthe big engineering and textile companies and chemical companies such as ICIthat employed many thousands of people. Today, the main employers are the university, the health authority, the hospitals, schools and colleges. The picture is totally transformed, and those are the jobs people do. If we want apprenticeships to grow, we have to embed them in the health service, local government, universities and all the public sector areas. If we do not do that, we shall not have high-quality apprenticeships and we shall not have them fast.
	I made a recommendation to the Department and to the Prime Minister 10 days ago, when my right hon. Friend was giving evidence to the Liaison Committee. I asked him if he could
	give a guarantee that no young person leaving school at 16 in this interim period, in the recession, before we get the leaving learning age to 18...will be without training or an apprenticeship.
	The Prime Minister said:
	I want us for school leavers to be able to be in a position to say that every school leaver will have the chance either of a job or of an apprenticeship or of some form of training that will take them through to a job in the future.
	That is quite a commitment and I hope it will be translated into Government action.
	Most people who have spoken so farcertainly the Front-Bench spokespeoplehave mentioned Ofqual and the Qualifications and Curriculum Agency. It is interesting that nearly everyone has homed in on the replacement for the QCA. The agency has a history, and the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) was at some pains to talk about the evidence for deteriorating standards in young people's GCSEs and A-levels. In an interjection, I pointed out that it was easy to find such evidence; indeed, the QCA appeared before the Education and Skills Committee, and the Children, Schools and Families Committee has visited other countriesfor example, to look at the Swedish model, which I prefer to the Finnish model, as some members of my Committee know. However, countries like the UKbig urban nations such as Germany, France, Italy and Spainshare the same difficulty as us; it is difficult to track standards over time, because everyone's system changes to some degree.
	The Committee asked questions of Ken Boston, the former head of the QCA. He is a fine public servant who had the honour and integrity to resign when he thought that he had got things wrong in terms of the testing regime last summer. That should not detract from the fact that he is a fine public servant and I thought he was a very good head of the QCA. When he gave evidence to the Committee, he made a robust defence of the maintenance of standards over time. We have to find a balance, because we can easily fall into the arguments set out in  The Sunday Times, The Times and the  Daily Mailthat standards have gone to pot and that none of our children does any work or achieves qualifications worth the paper they are written on. We all know about that kind of populist nonsense, but under my chairmanship, when the QCA was regularly interrogated over a long period, we received pretty satisfactory answers about the maintenance of standards over time.

Barry Sheerman: I was about to come to that point. There has been debate about the political independence of the QCA; it has been common currency that people wanted a more arm's length qualification body. We have also heard the argument

Phil Willis: The hon. Gentleman has much experience in the area. Does he agree that one of the real problems with the QCA was that it was trying to deal with two separate functionsqualifications and the curriculum? The new organisation, with a single focus, can let others develop a curriculum that is really appropriate and can then consider the appropriate qualifications that will follow.

Barry Sheerman: My hon. Friend makes a good point I mean the hon. Gentleman; it is hard to get that right when Opposition Members are on the same Committee as me. The fact is that in politics, we all like to deal in conspiracy theory. We all want to believe that a Minister rings people up and says, You do this for me or there'll be trouble, or Do this or you'll never get a renewal of your contract. In my experience, if a Ministerthey are only in post for a couple of years before they move on, anywayhad phoned up Ken Boston and said, Ken, I want you to do this, Ken, being an Australian, might have used pretty strong language in response. We might all talk about issues of political independence, but although there might be drift and there might be cases of people getting a little bit too chummy, I have seen no evidence of overt political interference. We need the two bodies to work properly, we need to ensure standards over time, and we need an independent curriculum watchdog if we are to get the curriculum right over time.
	I want to make a couple more points, generally on issues that arise from the Select Committee's inquiries. I cannot resist mentioning local government's new responsibilities towards young people with a custodial sentence. I am a bit worried about that, because there has been turmoil. The Education and Skills Committee, as it was, only got a handle on education in prisons when the Home Office lost responsibility for the issue and it passed to the Department for Education and Skills. We could then get involved. We held a thorough inquiry on the state of education in our prisonsit is still not very good. Most people know that. The hon. Member for Buckingham (John Bercow) knows extremely well how we feel about the fact that many people in prison or in custody have such a poor record when it comes to their start in life; they may have been in care, or may suffer from all kinds of special educational needs.
	It worried me when we saw the chaos brought about by Government changes to policy on the National Offender Management Service. We all know about the NOMS fiasco and what it did to prison education and much else. The Prison Service is still recovering from that, and now there is to be yet another change. Surely we need a consistent national approach to the educational needs of people in custody; looking at the Bill as printed, I am not sure how it is to achieve that.

Barry Sheerman: This is one of the first times that my hon. Friend and I have disagreed about anything in public. The change with regard to health was absolutely right; it works well. I am worried, because I do not know how the education and training side of things will work, and how we will ensure consistency in a very difficult area. Like or loathe him, David Freud and I have discussed how we can change prisoner's lives, and I think that he is absolutely right: we cannot focus on just one aspect of a prisoner's life, such as education or skills, and leave out housing need, addictions and other issues. We have to provide the full Monty, either when the person is in prison or when he or she comes out. It is a complicated job. My right hon. Friend the Minister for Schools and Learners may put my mind at rest, but at the moment, the custodial side of things worries me a good deal.
	It also worries me a bit that local authorities are to take over careers services. I have been around long enough to know that the last time they did so, they did not provide them very well at all. As a result, that responsibility was taken away from them. I want to make sure that the next bunch who do it, do it well. I am co-chair of the Skills Commission with Dame Ruth Silver. We looked at the information, advice and guidance. It is changing fast in a changeable and challenging area, and I am not sure whether the local authorities have the right tools to do the job. I am worried that many local authorities are ceasing to hold open competition and to use good private-sector expertise in delivering information, advice and guidance. Again, under the Bill, I am not sure how that will work out. Does the Minister want me to give way? I will make an exception and give way to him, although he is on the Front Bench.

Barry Sheerman: I thank my right hon. Friend for that; it leads nicely to my conclusion. I want to put my remarks in context. I am trying to be fair; I am Chairman of the Select Committee and I am trying to apportion blame fairly, but I must say that it is a great shame that the hon. Member for Surrey Heath, who speaks for the Opposition on Department for Children, Schools and Families matters, is not present. I have been Chairman of the Select Committee for some time, so I have been to more schools than most Ministers, as they have not been around for as long as me. I go to about three educational settings a week. Whatever the banter in the Chamber between the two main parties, in the past 10 years or so, I have found that progress on educational standards has improved dramatically in the schools to which I go. I go to schools up and down the country, to early-years settings, to primary schools and to secondary schools. I can see a real change in our educational system. I hate it when  The Times, The Sunday Times, and perhaps some of the cheaper newspapers, go on and on as if there was everything wrong and nothing right with the state system of education. I think we have a fantastic state system of education. In  The Sunday TimesI shall be kindwhere a former chief inspector has a regular column, there is a pernicious drip, drip, drip, to the effect that any sane, intelligent, middle class person with the income will send their child to independent private education. That is an insidious message that says that people who send their children to state education are in some way lesser beings.
	I find that state education is fantastic. I have four children. They all went to state education and they are all doing all right. I recommend to all hon. Members that they support the schools that the vast majority of their constituents send their children to. It is a very good example. I say that to many vicars as well.
	In conclusion, I am a little worried that at a time of recession, we are changing an awful lot of organisation on the ground. In the Select Committee report, we warned the Government. We asked them, at this late stage, to hold off changing again the whole learning and skills structure and the way training is delivered. No sooner do people out there get used to something when some politician tries to change it. The Minister for Schools and Learning, who is having a private conversation, knows that that is the truth.
	The Government want employers in small and medium-sized enterprises to endorse the system. I know the Minister spends a great deal of time in his constituency. If he goes, as I do in Huddersfield, to small and medium-sized businesses and asks why they are not taking on apprentices or skilling up their work force, it is because they find the system so darn complicated that it puts them off. I join the Opposition in highlighting the complexity of taking on an apprentice and the difficulty of understanding all the acronyms, which are all about to change, making it even more difficult for the people at the grass roots.
	Having evenly shared out my bouquets and my barbs, I thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for your generosity in letting a Back Bencher speak for so long.

John Bercow: It is a pleasure to follow the Chair of the Children, Schools and Families Committee, the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman), to whose thoughtful contribution I listened with respect. I declare an interest as an adviser to the Priory Group, which owns a number of special schools around the country.
	I start by offering strong support to the proposal in the Bill to give statutory recognition to children's trusts by mandating the creation of children's trusts boards in every part of the country. It is important in this context to underline that the children's trust is not some abstract, esoteric philosophical construct divorced from the reality of public service delivery and children and young people's opportunity. On the contrary, the children's trust is or should be the embodiment of the local partnership between the commissioners of services for children, young people and their families, and the providers of those services.
	As such, the children's trust has a responsibility to spearhead the process of integrated commissioning across education, social care and health services. Necessarily in the process if it undertakes that work, it will bring together and work with local authorities, primary care trusts and social services departments, but it does not end there. Very likely, if the work is done properly, it will involve the children's trust's interaction with and learning from a range of other organisationsfor example, the Connexions service, youth offending teams, Sure Start children's centres, the police service, housing services, leisure services and voluntary organisations.
	I am not sure that there is adequate recognition of the significance of the children's trust. The difficulty is that five years ago, for entirely understandable reasons, the Government did not want to invest those trusts with too much formal responsibility. They were susceptible to the criticism if they did so that local discretion would be unduly fettered or constrained. The result is that on the ground there may be a children's trust, but in many cases there are what are amorphously known as children's trust arrangements, and they are not as specific or explicit as a children's trust.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), the shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, said in his contribution that the track record of the children's trusts so far has been chequered at best and subject to ferocious criticism. There is no denying that last year's Audit Commission report is very critical of the work of the trusts so far. It says, among other things, that the trusts are guilty of a failure to distinguish between strategic, executive and operational issues.
	The report laments the fact that many of the representatives on those children's trusts boards that exist lack a mandate from their sponsoring organisations to offer a view about policy or, more particularly, to commit resources. It rues the reality, too, that there is often among the members of the trusts little or no experience whatever of the process of joint commissioning, which the Government believe to be integral to the future successful delivery of services to children, young people and their families.
	When I undertook a review of speech, language and communication services for children from 0 to 19 for the Government between 2007 and 2008, it was also my sense, regrettably, that in respect of health and education services, all too often there was a tendency to commission separately, based on different understandings, different priorities and different processes. The Audit Commission is justified in saying that so far, over the five years, there is little evidence that the trusts have made a substantial difference to outcomes for children, young people and their families, but the burden of my contention is that that is not of itself an indictment of the notion that there should be children's trusts or joint commissioning arrangements. Rather, it is a reflection of the reality that all too often those trusts are themselves intangible.
	Going round the country, I wanted to see the trust, to hear the trust, to smell the trust, to recognise the trust in action, and I would often ask besuited individuals of great seniority in the commissioning or delivery of local services whether there was a trust in that area, of what it consisted, and what it was doing. I have to say that I was greeted, in a multiplicity of places around the country, with answers of quite the most stupendous and unsurpassable eloquence, at the end of which I was absolutely none the wiser as to whether anything was being done on that front. That leads me to say that at least on the surface there would appear to be a good Government case for changing the arrangement and offering a degree of a lead from the top in saying that there should be statutory recognition.

Annette Brooke: I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way and for making some of the points that he is making. Does he agree that those varied and nebulous organisations are difficult to scrutinise, and that it is difficult for a parent, for example, to challenge a decision that might go back to the children's trust?

John Bercow: My impression was that my hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State had made a commitment to the centres. However, the hon. Gentleman need not doubt for a moment that I will crawl over the minutiaeevery wordof what my hon. Friend said. I hope that he made a commitment. If he did, I congratulate him; if he did not, he needs to make it. These centres are doing excellent work; they need to develop that work and require the financial support to do so.
	I want to conclude with an unrelated observation concerning clause 84 on the election for apprenticeship scheme. I can see merit in what the Government are proposing, but I have a sneaking dissatisfaction with the terms of the clause as currently drafted. The requirement that to be successful in securing such an apprenticeship applicants should have to have level 2 or level 3 qualifications seems excessively arbitrary and draconian. I ask the Minister to reconsider that, for one simple reason: there will be young people around this country, perhaps on the autistic spectrumI know of several examplesor with other special educational needs who are not academically equipped to succeed in examinations or whose school careers have been blighted by late intervention, a denial of opportunity and poor treatment, and who therefore have not gained qualifications but would be well suited to such an apprenticeship. They often have a particular interest in a given set of things and a fascination for how they work, as well as a sense of the priorities of the project and an ability to concentrate on it and make a real success of it. I simply say to Ministers that, in the understandable quest to guarantee that certain standards are set and maintained, they should not be arbitrary and give up the opportunity of some very vulnerable children and young people gaining access to qualifications from which they would benefit.

John Bercow: The hon. Gentleman credits me with a level of detailed knowledge of the precise thought processes and current policy positions of my hon. Friends on the Front Bench that I do not possess. On that basis, I am inclined to resile from that particular challenge.
	I have calculatedly focused on those aspects of the Bill that I especially welcome, and I make no apology for that. I would like to think that in certain aspects of children's and young people's policy we could start to develop a genuine consensus that will endure irrespective of which party happens to be in office at the time. We all talk about trying to do the right thing in the national interest irrespective of party politics, but that is the approach that I am taking. Important parts of this Bill are extremely welcome. I wish them success and hope that they achieve what I believe they can and I know Ministers want to see.

Sharon Hodgson: I am pleased to be able to speak in this Second Reading debate. You may be pleased to hear, Madam Deputy Speaker, that I will keep my comments short because, like many other hon. Members, I am used to having to curtail them to a set time, although I notice that today there is no such set time. It is perhaps a shame that Front Benchers did not follow suit.
	I wholeheartedly welcome the Bill. In the interests of brevity, I will be unable to mention all the parts that I consider important, because there are so many. It is gratifying to see that it is being taken through by two Government Departments working together to achieve the best results for the people whom they serve. The focus on apprenticeships does much to consolidate the Government's commitment to them for many years to come. I understand that in 1997 barely 15,000 young people completed apprenticeships in a year and that that number has now leapt to well over 100,000. I suppose that that is no surprise when we consider that in 1997, when the Conservatives were in power, the amount of public funding for apprenticeships was precisely zero.
	The briefings that I have received on the Bill have had one thing in commonthey all welcome it. They do so because they recognise its commitment to building the skills and potential of people and that this commitment can only enrich the skills and potential of business. I welcome it for that reason, and for many more. I am delighted that it will place the legacy of Sure Start and children's centres on a sounder legislative footing, meaning that they are not left at the mercy of those who may not value the ongoing contributions to the community made by centres such as those in Felling and Washington in my constituency. Having said that, it sounds as though Conservative Front Benchers may now have made a commitment to support such a secure future for children's centres and Sure Start. I, too, will read in detail the Opposition spokesman's comments.
	It is good to see greater support for nurseries. I know from my own experience in Gateshead that local authority flexibility can be key in delivering nursery places for local children. There will always be a need for such local flexibility, and I hope that the right balance can be found between that and the Government's laudable desire to boost support for nurseries.
	As hon. Members may know, I am committed to trying to raise awareness in our schools of the extra challenges faced by pupils with special educational needs and medical conditions. The recognition provided for school support staff in the Bill will give professionals whose role is not primarily to educate pupils the chance to have a voice that should enable them to build on their skills to make pupils' needs a priority. There are concerns among trade unionsas alluded to by my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool, South (Mr. Marsden), who is no longer in his placethat the current wording of the Bill may not enable those thousands of staff to secure the upturn in pay and conditions that they deserve. I know that Ministers will be keen to ensure that in granting such a voice to support staff, any loopholes in the legislation will not be allowed to remain, so that eventually that voice falls on deaf ears. Furthermore, the right to request time to train should help, in time, to create a culture of ongoing learning for professionals. I hope that that right will be exercised by all professionals, especially teachers, in order to ensure that no one is asked to do a job for which they feel inadequately prepared. This should not be seen, as it is by some, as a back door route to skiving, but as a chance for employer and employee to seize mutual benefits wherever possible.
	There is much more to welcome, but time is pressing on. A barrage of plaudits and praise may sound like music to Ministers' ears, but I want also to take the chance to provide some feedback. I want to sound a note of caution about two broad issues, based on experiencethose affected by some of the proposed changes are only too right to want to see those issues flagged up.
	I was contacted last week by the North East chamber of commerce. I have plenty of experience of the north-east and am aware that the North East chamber of commerce is the only chamber of commerce of the region. Its members also employ 30 per cent. of the regional work force, so it was no surprise when its briefing made it to my in-tray and caught my attention. Like me, the North East chamber of commerce is an ardent advocate of the north-east. That is why I am keen to highlight its concern that the Young People's Learning Agency, tasked with providing education and training to young people, should not lose a clear sense of strategic direction or indeed any expertise when its work is implemented at a local authority level. We need to ensure that an effective sub-national structure reflects regional variations in the circumstances of young people and the requirements of employers. The Learning and Skills Council has done a good job of taking account of both those factors and it is vital that such an understanding is maintained.
	The changes set out in the Bill are far reaching and I have already commented on how far apprenticeships have come thanks to the Government's ongoing endeavours. I mentioned earlier that North East chamber of commerce members employ 30 per cent. of the regional work force. Given that last year in my local authority areas more than 3,200 apprenticeships were undertaken, it is a fair bet that many of the employers leading such schemes are members of the chamber of commerce. It is therefore wise to listen to their concerns about the potential turbulence that will be experienced during any period of flux while the proposed changes are introduced. The split responsibilities of the Young People's Learning Agency and the Skills Funding Agency, for commissioning and for funding and resourcing, will need a watchful eye to be kept.
	I urge Ministers to recognise the way in which the north-east is responding to the current economic difficulties. We recently suffered a bitter blow with the loss of 1,200 jobs at Nissan but partners across the region have been quick to pull together and to work together. Nissan showed a willingness to invest in its workers, working with Gateshead college to secure training. That desire to develop the work force is reflected in the bid for further funding now before DIUS ministers. There are nearly 20,000 apprentices in the region and there is a willingness to gain the new skills that will unlock new opportunities. Ministers should grasp the chances across the region with both hands.
	I asked Ministers at the end of last year whether they were aware of the potential for some apprenticeships, such as the employer-led programmes run by the charity Rathbone, to fall foul of the new legislation. I know that Ministers want to use the definitions of apprenticeships to avoid any unscrupulous exploitation, and that is laudable and right, but it would be good to have further assurances that such valuable charitable projects will not be impeded by the legislative changes. Rathbone places young people with poor behavioural and educational records with employers and we should do all we can to support its efforts.
	Another aspect of the Bill affects children and young people with special educational needs. It is great to see that so much attention has been paid to ensuring that the changes in the Bill will benefit all children and young people. It builds on DCSF's agenda for supporting children with special educational needs and will complement the Aiming High for Disabled Children programme, the children's plan, the eminent Bercow review, the Lamb inquiry, the Rose review and the forthcoming Ofsted review.
	May I also say how encouraged I was to hear the Secretary of State's remarks about the steps the Government plan to take on autism in the forthcoming autism Bill? I know that there is a great strength of feeling that we must strive to improve services for children with autism and other special educational needs. It is good to see that that aim is uppermost in Ministers' minds. I want to reiterate the hope of the autism lobby that local authorities will seek to consider the needs of disabled children at all times when considering their plans for children and young people.
	There can be no doubt about the Government's commitment to children with special educational needs, but none the less I want to raise one or two queries that I believe might need further examination in Committee. Like many other Members, I have received a briefing from the Special Educational Consortium, which is, as ever, thorough and well-considered. It states:
	The duty to carry out a robust needs analysis and audit provision is an integral part of the widely-supported sufficiency duty in the recent Childcare Act and should be mirrored here.
	We need to know whether local authorities that are taking on extra responsibility for provision will be audited to ensure that they come up to scratch. One of the purposes of my private Member's Bill, which is now the Special Educational Needs (Information) Act 2008, was to try and ensure a greater spotlight on local authority performance in order to highlight best practice. Identifying and supporting all needs will be integral to the success of the transition of responsibility and I hope that Ministers will find a way of ensuring some means of monitoring performance and outcomes for pupils.
	It is good to see that the Government's Every Child Matters goals continue to be reflected in the Bill and the duty on local authorities to promote well-being is to be welcomed. Given the new obligations on local authorities with regard to post-16 education, it would be good to know if the duty to promote well-being will be carried over, as it should be if we are to ensure that the system has an inbuilt commitment to the future of young people.
	My final point concerns the welcome reforms to prison education. We know that there is a far higher prevalence of special educational needs among the prison population and that greater demand is therefore placed on those who teach that population. It takes special skills to deal with special needs and that is why statements are issued for those with the most severe needs. We must not give up on those who are in prison and I hope that Ministers will consider stating explicitly that statements will be recognised in prison education as they are in any other educational provision.
	Overall, the Bill represents a Labour Government doing what they do best: working together to improve the opportunities available to all. During the transition from the school corridors to the workplace, young people can easily find themselves getting stuck or facing a few bumps along the way. In the current climate we cannot ensure that things will go smoothly for everyone, but the focus on skills in the Bill should create a lasting legacy for many millions. In a society where a job for life is becoming a thing of the past it is worth remembering that while many of the challenges we face are temporary, skills are permanent.

Tim Boswell: May I begin with a brief tribute to Lord Dearing, to whom I referred in my intervention? I had some experience of working with him and of his working for me during the 1990s, and I thought that he was an exemplary public servant: calm, rational and clear. He always had an underlying sense of values and decency that was greatly appreciated by all those from every party who came in touch with him. I think that this debate has generally been informed by those values. One or two people have sometimes fallen below that level and have resorted to political rhetoric, but I shall leave the House to draw its conclusions on which Members I have in mind.
	I should say that procedurally I deprecate the portmanteau Bills that come along with everything that a Departmentor in this case, two Departmentscan trawl up. It means that Back Benchers, other Members of Parliament, Select Committees and even Ministers themselves cannot focus on all the powers. I doubt that there is a single person in the Chamber who has read every one of the 214 pages of the Bill and I am quite sure that nobody will have equivalent focus across the different sectors that are referred to.
	Secondly, I think that it is an index of the problem of legislative indigestionperhaps it is the last clutches of a dying Governmentthat the provisions have all been pushed through two Select Committees in draft and we had only just commented on them and received a Government response before we moved on to the substantive legislation. However, we will make of it the best that we can.
	I have three interests to declare. First, I am a fellow of City and Guilds, which is an examining and awarding body. I am on the Skills Commission and I was 15 years ago, nowa Higher and Further Education Minister. The amazing thing about that is that we reorganise in one direction and then we re-reorganise in another. The issues do not change; it is just the way we are going at the time that seems to be different. I am proud to have shadowedsome eight years agothe establishment of the Learning and Skills Council by this Government, and even more relieved to be playing my part in laying it to rest.
	I am not going to refer to the provisions dealing with those of compulsory age except in two respects. First, I commend the remarkable presentation by my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) on concerns about school standards. I absolutely agree that we should not conduct this debate at the level of the saloon bar. Proper, independent evaluation and reassurance are needed. That is important for pupils, who need to know that what they are getting is valuable, for their parents, andperhaps that was not quite brought outfor employers too. We all need such reassurance.
	Secondly, I would like to put in a word for those not in education, employment or trainingthe NEETSwho may be in short-stay schools, or however they are to be renamed. I had a positive experience in my constituency a few weeks ago when I met a group of NEETS who were taking part in an intensive, well-structured programme led by the voluntary sector. I was surprised by what took place. We sat them down and engaged with them intensely, listening to what they had to saynot always a strength of Members of Parliament, in my experienceand suddenly one could hear a pin drop. They wanted to communicate, and I thought, What a waste, and what a sad thing it was that we had to put in all that intense effort to begin to recover their interest and enthusiasm. But I think that we all want to do so.
	If I am empanelled to serve on the Committee, I may want to say something about the difficult technical interactions concerning qualifications and the new Ofqual, but I shall leave that to one side today. More generally, I am concerned about the architecture and fit of the provisions for adolescents and adults, now beginning to separate out in turn, alongside those for the compulsory years. That has always been a problem for the Ministryhowever describeddealing with education. It is difficult to know where to draw the line between compulsory years provision and later provision, which is, in a sense, voluntary or optional, although that demarcation has changed. As far as the providers are concerned, sixth-form colleges, of which there are fewer than 100, will be stranded among a much larger number of schools, while general or specialist FE colleges will be detached because the Skills Funding Agency will be adult-based. All those below the age of 19 will be a matter, more or less, for the local authoritiesa reversal of the 1992 changesalong with the young persons authority. In turn, that will tend to diminish further the local authority commitment to community education and lifelong learning, to which I am strongly committed.
	I know that Ministers, particularly in these Departments, are bound to be erudite, but I am always amazed by their ability to forget the prescriptions of Occam's razor, which translate here as, Do not multiply the number of entities unless it is absolutely necessary. They have performed the amazing trick of creating more agencies than they are replacing. I commend Ministers modestly to consider the report that our Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee produced post-Leitch, particularly the wiring diagram on the front cover prepared by the National Audit Officenot drawn up by uson how everything fits together. That shows how complex the situation is, and if it is complex for us as relative specialists, how much more difficult must it be for employers, parents and pupils to understand what is going on?
	There is a separate monograph to be written, but not to be delivered tonight, on the importance of the transitional arrangements for the various parts of education provision. As those in the military know, it is at the point of transition that there is a point of weakness. If the baton is not carried on well, provision is not secured. That idea has been behind the specialist representations we have all received on special educational needs and prison education. There may be interesting juridical problems, because one could argue that it would be discriminatory if prison education, to which I am strongly committed, were not provided with the ability for people to carry on with their statements. I suspect that there may well be litigation about that.
	There is also a practical problem. There are three penal establishments in my constituency, one of which is at least partially still a young offenders institution, and one a secure training centre. They are located so close to the geographical edge of my constituency that it is impossible to access them without going through another county. In fact, it took five years for me to persuade the Home Office that they were in my constituency, and now they will have to be served by Northamptonshire county council. I do not cavil about that authority; Ministers have grumbled about it recently, but I shall leave that for another occasion. Given the nature of prison education, it is difficult to get the same moral commitment to it that any county would wish to give to its schools.
	I shall wrap up my comments on those elements of the Bill with a slightly more strategic view before I come to the aspect I want to focus on. First, not merely from nostalgiabecause we enjoyed such a process in the 1990sI commend the thinking of my hon. Friends on the Front Bench on the need for a light-touch funding agency. Secondly, we must ensure that further education colleges, and other education and training providers, are not subverted by excessive bureaucratic interference, as they were in recent years, or by a skewed funding model that distorts their provision. Thirdly, I do not believe that the Bill puts sufficient emphasis on the self-starting model of education. That includes the importance of skills accounts, and I entirely endorse the comments of the hon. Member for Blackpool, South (Mr. Marsden), a fellow member of our Select Committee, about the importance of such provision, and the importance of routes into adult learning. That may be a more diverse view than a purely instrumental one, but it has been my view all the time when considering such matters, and I still assert it.

Tim Boswell: I strongly endorse that comment. I have never been happy about the split. I know that there are reasons for it, but it has just created another difficulty. It could be argued that the somewhat arbitrary decision to divide the Departments has driven some of the changes in the Billchanges made in order to mirror those departmental changes.
	I now come to my main comments on apprenticeship provisions. We looked at the draft provisions in our respective Select Committees, and believe they can be made reasonably fit for purpose. For the first time in recorded history, the word apprenticeship at least comes first, rather than as an add-on to piece of legislationor perhaps it is not quite the first time. We should always pause before we legislate, and in this case we should do so to reflect on the fact that the sector was historically heavily regulated. I refer of course to the Statute of Apprentices 1563, which survived in force substantially for 250 years. For most of its last century, from the reign of good Queen Anne onwards, it provided an invaluable source of revenue to the Government through stamp duty on indenturesan early form of stealth tax perhaps. The whole thing was too narrow, too bureaucratic and too inflexible. We must remember such pitfalls when codifying rules for apprenticeships, apprenticeship frameworks and the qualifications, and all the safeguards. I see that the Minister is nodding about the importance of quality and so on. We must not have a negative outcome because things are too complicated, when we could have a positive one with a simple system that is fit for purpose.
	In particular, we need to take account of the industrial interests that have made representations to usthe CBI, the Association of Learning Providers and others, some of which the hon. Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West (Mrs. Hodgson) mentioned. I shall summarise those representations briefly.
	It is really important that the frameworks that are set up have the hand of employers on them and are designed by employers, not invented by academics as though they were in employers' interests. I endorse the view that was often expressed in evidence to the Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee that the system also requires trade union involvement, because both sides should be engaged in getting the right framework.
	Secondly, there need to be links to employers in real workplaces. We could get ourselves into unnecessary theological distinctions about programme-led apprenticeships, but my view is that a programme provided and delivered in further education or by a specialist charitable provider may be useful and worth while in itself or in preparation for an apprenticeship, but it is not a replacement for a work-based experience.

Mary Creagh: It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Daventry (Mr. Boswell), who managed to avoid party political attacks until right at the end of his speech.
	I should like to take the House back to last November and Wakefield college's graduation ceremony, which I attended in our city's great cathedral. The graduands processed through the Saturday morning traffic, stopping it, and walked through the crowds of shoppers to take up their places and emerge into our city as graduates. They brought with them their parents, partners, teachers, children and friendsthe people who had supported them through their years of hard work and studying, months of revision and assignments and weeks of waiting anxiously for their results. I watched them leave the cathedral and go out to eat a delicious buffet created for them by Wakefield college's catering staff and students, who do a mean egg mayonnaise sandwich. They went out into the world with the confidence that a degree brings.
	Without the hard work of their teachers and the support of the college, those people would be facing a changing job market unskilled and unprepared. Investment in higher and further education is an investment in the future of those young people and the future of Wakefield. Investing in skills in the Wakefield district is really important, because a quarter of the people who work there have no qualifications, which is the highest rate in the region. More than 39 per cent. of working age people there have no qualifications, and just 18 per cent. of our work force have degrees. For us, the Bill is no academic debate but is vital to the future of the city and the district.
	Wakefield college has to work hard to attract its students. In 2006, just 68 per cent. of school leavers in the district stayed on in full-time education, the third lowest rate in the country after Barnsley and Salford. That rate is lower than both the national average of 78 per cent. and the regional average in Yorkshire, which is 73 per cent., despite the Government's many initiatives such as the education maintenance allowance, which they introduced to help students from lower-income families to stay on in education.
	I tell Ministers that raising the school leaving age to 18 in six years' time will transform the life chances of young people in Wakefield. Schools in Wakefield city have no sixth forms, so the college is the only route to further education for young people in the area. A-levels, apprenticeships and national diplomas are all offered, and a new campus opened this month at Whitwood in the constituency of my right hon. Friend the Member for Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper). It cost 31 million to build, with a 10 per cent. contribution from the Learning and Skills Council. That campus will focus on entry-to-employment courses and vocational education in the north-east of the district, which has the greatest difficulty in attracting young people to, and retaining them in, further and higher education.
	I was concerned to learn that the funding for rebuilding the college's city centre campus has been put on hold for three months. However, unlike the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), I will not engage in shroud waving. The council has had approval in principle for the 67 million project, with 40 million due to come from the LSC and the rest from a bank loan and capital receipts. It is imperative that learners in the city have access to first-class college facilities, and the building forms part of the regeneration of what will be the new merchant quarter, which includes a new city centre train station and a new living and working area at the gateway to our city. I have met the Under-Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills, my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Mr. Simon) and been reassured by that meeting. The principal of Wakefield college and I met my hon. Friend a few weeks ago to impress on him the need for the new facilities in Wakefield.
	It is also vital to expand the higher education opportunities in the district. That has become critical since the university of Leeds pulled out of the Bretton Hall performing arts centre in the wonderful Yorkshire sculpture parkI encourage all hon. Members to pay it a visit in the next recess. It is a fantastic place500 acres of country park, with the finest sculptures of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth dotted among the sheep. I impress on Ministers the necessity for a speedy final decision by the LSC.
	It is instructive to look behind some of the Conservative rhetoric on investment and remember the reality of Tory Government investment in education and skills. In 1996-97, earmarked Conservative Government expenditure on FE capital expenditure on building was nil. A National Audit Office report stated that college buildings were not fit places in which to learn. The Conservatives let those buildings go to rack to ruin and the Conservative Government cut FE funding by 7 per cent. in real terms in the four years up to 1997.

Mary Creagh: As the hon. Gentleman says, we share a birthday. However, our political opinions diverge. Why was the capital budget spent on health and safety? Was it to avoid objects falling off classrooms on to young people's heads? Were the buildings in such disrepair? If so, why did not the Conservative Government prioritise such spending more?
	Let us compare the Conservative record on capital investment with that of the Government, who have so far invested 2 billion on renewing and modernising FE facilities, with another 2.3 billion promised for the next three years. It is interesting to note that the Conservative party makes political capital out of FE while we spend capital to get colleges built.
	The number of people who complete an apprenticeship in Wakefield has nearly trebled in the past few years. For many young people, it is a route to a high quality, skilled job. My friend told me about her son queuing up with many young people to get access to apprenticeships in our district. The Bill will place apprenticeships on a statutory footing. It guarantees that all suitably qualified young people will be entitled to a place by 2013. It will also ensure that young people in schools receive proper information, advice and guidance about vocational training opportunities.
	I was saddened this weekend to see in my surgery a lady who told me about her daughter, who got reasonably good results at a local school, but decided not to go on to college at 16 and is now not in education, employment or training. My constituent's family had not had much education, and she said that her daughter had now decided that she wanted to go to college, but that all the courses that she wished to take did not start till next September. Her daughter has six months to waita wasted year of losing out on opportunities.

Mary Creagh: I thank my hon. Friend for that point. The Government of the time must have known about employers' use of YTS trainees as cheap labour in the 1980s. It was a scandal. Not only Labour politicians say that. In 199810 years laterthe academic Professor Sarah Vickerstaff wrote in the  Journal of Vocational Education  Training:
	The legacy of youth training has for many had the combined effect of undermining the image of 'training' for young people and of 'schemes' for employers.
	We may cavil about some of the difficulties and complexities of the current architecture of FE training, but YTS was almost a dirty word in the city in which I grew up.
	That is such a contrast from the apprentices whom I met recently in Wakefield. I visited TEi, a heavy engineering firm in my constituency, and met Katy Roe, who was a trainee apprentice welder. That brings us back to advice and guidance on trying to get young women into non-traditional employment. Many young women think that the only apprenticeships they can do are in child caring, other caring, teaching and so on. Hairdressing is a classic example of a job for which there are many apprenticeships. That tends to be low-paid work. Katy has now finished her apprenticeship and can look forward to a future of working to build the next generation of power stations in this country and, as a 22-year-old woman, earning herself a salary of 40,000 a year, which is way above the national average. I am delighted to congratulate her on winning Yorkshire apprentice of the year. Indeed, she is going forward to the Learning and Skills Council's national competition, and I wish her well in that, too.
	Next year, 35,000 extra apprenticeships will be created, working in both the public and private sectors. I welcome the Secretary of State's emphasis on training in awarding private finance initiative schools contracts. That is a great step forward.
	Another thing that I would mention from the '80s is the end of the council house building programme. Again, we have a lost generation from that period, when construction apprentices could not get good quality public sector apprenticeships building social housing. Next year, 750,000 people will start apprenticeships, compared with just 75,000 in 1997.
	I want now to deal with the skills needs of older people. Train to Gain, our flagship programme of training in the workplace, has so far helped more than 1 million people get on at work. Some 43 per cent. of those who took up training last year were promoted and a third got a pay rise. I visited Morrison's supermarket and met the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers learning reps over the meat and fish counter. That experience brought home to me the power of peer education in the work force, where the people who work with each other and trust each otherthey might have a chat or perhaps go out for a drink togethermight say, I've noticed that you're not that confident at reading, or, How's your maths? or, You've got a real talent for this. Why don't you go further? or, Why don't you be the health and safety rep, the fire rep or the first-aider? Peer education is a non-threatening reintroduction for people who perhaps left school at 16 or had a poor school experience, or who might be lacking in confidence or have been out of the work force for a while. The Bill will give 22 million workers the right to ask for time to train, in the same way that workers are able to ask for flexible working.
	We need to use that programme to set people's creativity free. Firms need to use it to say, We're not just going to train someone to scan products on a till faster; we're going to see what great ideas are there in our work force. I ask the Minister to encourage firms to allow people to have time off for training that does not directly affect their jobs. The women whom I spoke to wanted to be able to go home and help their children do research on the internet, but they were not allowed access to internet-based skills training, because it was not directly relevant to their job as cashiers in a supermarket.
	Wakefield college also has a centre of vocational excellence in enterprise management and will be making good use of the 350 million that the Government have announced for training in small and medium-sized enterprises and for improving productivity quickly. A global recession is the time to increase, not reduce, investment in skills and training. I am afraid that that is a lesson that the Conservative party has not learned from the recessions of the '80s and '90s. Companies that do not invest in training are 2.5 times more likely to fail than those that do.
	The Government do not believe that top quality education should be the privilege of the few or the young. In contrast to the Tories, we are putting forward the funding that ensures that access to further education is available to everyonereal help now for students, businesses and workers. The Conservatives would cut 610 million from our universities, skills and science budget. I will give way now if any member of their Front-Bench team wishes to put the record straight, perhaps in the same way that we saw the record on funding for Sure Start centres being put straightor perhaps slightly less wobblyearlier. I will happily give way, but nobody is standing up to intervene, so I assume that they are happy with our calculations.
	The Conservatives do not understand Keynes's paradox of thrift. Keynes said that although thrift is to be encouraged in private individuals, it is a public vice. Being thrifty is not an appropriate step for Governments to take in a recession. I am afraid that the Conservative party is isolated in the world in saying that it would cut public spending now. Those cuts would mean that not a single person over the age of 19 would start an apprenticeship next year, compared with the 122,000 who will be supported by Labour.
	Even after that drastic step, the Tories would still slash 427 million from the universities, skills and science budget to balance the books. That is the equivalent of 100,000 students at university or a third of a million people on college courses. In an interesting exchange with the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood), the hon. Member for Surrey Heath said, Well, we'd spend it, but we'd spend it better. The Conservatives cannot talk about cuts of half a billion pounds having no impact on front-line services. They really lack credibility.
	To conclude, there are many more things to welcome in the Bill. I particularly welcome the adult advice and careers service. I have faced a particular difficulty in trying to get people who are out of work to access proper careers guidance and the career development loans that we have made available. There is a dearth of information about that. Creating that new agency will make a real difference in helping people pursue their goals of lifelong learning. Creating a single negotiating body for the school support staff, in order to ensure that pay and conditions keep up with those of equivalent workers and to ensure better career progression and training, will be really good. Indeed, we have increased the number of those new workers by 200,000 over the past 10 years.
	Finally, I am particularly pleased that the Bill will encourage pupil attendance partnerships. I do not understand why certain schools take a hard line on truancy and behaviour and others allow it to continue. Truancy and disruption impact on the silent majority of good, willing pupils who are there to learn.
	As someone who has a young offenders institution in their constituency, I welcome the steps to ensure that education in prison is as good as it can be. I am not sure that I share the concerns of the hon. Member for Daventry about judicial review concerning access to education. The civil and social rights that we enjoy are conditional upon our behaving according to the rules of society. Any judge sitting on a case brought against a young person would say that if someone has committed a violent offence, they lose the right to access, for example, to their work-based training.
	I would like also to mention West Yorkshire fire and rescue service's public service programmethis relates to the point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Devonport (Alison Seabeck)which involves taking disaffected 14 and 15-year-olds out of school and working with them. They are put in red uniforms and given all sorts of training in fire safety and health safety. The scheme is fantastic. Young people who are school refusers or just not interested start to carry themselves well and to enjoy being part of a public sector programme. I encourage Ministers to come to Wakefield and see how what the fire service is doing can be applied creatively to other public sector apprenticeship schemes.
	As a trustee of Rathbone for seven years, I am also passionate about the role that the voluntary sector can play. For young people who may have failed or had nothing else in their lives, an apprenticeship might be the one good thing in their lives. It is important that the Bill should put apprenticeships on an equal footing with other forms of training and education and that it should give every young person the chance to succeed in life.

Phil Willis: I congratulate the hon. Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh) on her application for a ministerial post. I trust that one will be forthcoming.
	One of the interesting points about this debate is that while Front Benchers from all three parties spent a great deal of time talking about the provisions in the Bill dealing with schools, which [ Interruption. ] Shh!  [Interruption.] Sorry, I thought that I was the head teacher.  [ Laughter. ] I was just about to send my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton (Mr. Browne) out, but I realise that only you can do that, Madam Deputy Speaker. I will speak to him later. While Front Benchers inevitably concentrated a great deal on the schools provisions, Back Benchers, virtually to a man and a woman, have spent most of their time talking about the skills elements. The Government are to be congratulated on having apprenticeships and skills not only in the Bill's title, but in its content. I say that because I have a number of comments to makesome rather unfortunate about the Bill as a whole.
	I would also like to put on record my appreciation of Lord DearingRon Dearing. He has been paid many tributes today, and rightly so. I remember, as many Members will, what a breakthrough the Education Reform Act 1988 was, in that it set up the national curriculum and all that followed from that. It was also enormously complicated, however, and it required Ron Dearing to come along and make sense of the complication, which was so intense that most schools and most teachers could not understand it. Many teachers will appreciate the work that he did.
	I came into contact with Ron Dearing in the House in 1998, when his famous report was virtually ditched at the first go by the then Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett), who in fact bastardised the issue of tuition fees without looking at the rest of the Bill. Ron Dearing had laid out, in his report, the foundations of what he saw as a 21st-century higher education system that would be fit for purpose, but much of what was in the report was put on a shelf. The only thing that wemyself includedconcentrated on was the introduction of fees, which was rather sad. Ron Dearing will be enormously missed. He was a genuine Cross Bencher who did not pay lip service to any master.
	This is a massive Bill, and the hon. Member for Daventry (Mr. Boswell) was right to say that it was a portmanteau Bill. It is a substantial Bill that deals with skills and schools, but the reason that it is so substantial is that we now have two Departments dealing with these matters. The Bill patches up some of the problems caused by the machinery of government changes in 2007. We had to have a plethora of new organisations because the machinery of government changes did not take into account that splitting education and training at 19 would drive a coach and horses through the whole agenda. We have had all those different organisations as a result. The Bill has 256 clauses and 16 schedules, and I hope that, when the business managers compile the programme motion, they will allow sufficient time to debate all the issues. There is a will on both sides of the House for the Bill to succeed and for it to be improved in Committee, and I genuinely hope that that occurs.
	The Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee, which I chair, together with the Children, Schools and Families Committee, had an opportunity to scrutinise the draft Apprenticeships Bill, which we appreciated, even though we were told about it, rather than being asked about it. Pre-legislative scrutiny is an essential element of good legislation, and if the Government want to take it seriously, Select Committees must be given the appropriate time to do it. We also need to be given all the available information.
	In respect of the apprenticeships element of the Bill, a lot of the organisation that we have talked about today will be somewhat irrelevant. It is the quality of what happens during an apprenticeship that lies at the heart of the matter. The Select Committee asked for the specification of apprenticeship standards, and that is now to be produced as part of the legislation. However, the standards appeared in draft form only at noon todaythe day we returned after a recess, and the day on which the Bill is to be given its Second Reading. That is unacceptable from a Government who want the whole House to take this issue seriously. Despite those problems, however, we welcome the Government's commitment to apprenticeships. I now want to concentrate on two elements of the apprenticeships agenda: programme-led apprenticeships, and quality.
	During our Committee's deliberations on the draft Bill, we were not overly concerned about programme-led apprenticeships, once the Minister had made it clear that there was a fundamental distinction between employer-led apprenticeships and programme-led apprenticeships that were carried out in colleges as pre-apprenticeship education and training before people moved into a full apprenticeship. However, the reality is that, if the word apprenticeship appears in the title, most people do not differentiate between the two. The Committee expressed a real fearand that fear is growingthat there is a demand to grow the number of apprenticeships while, in the face of a fierce recession, employers are not taking on apprentices. The public sector must rightly take up a significant amount of the slack, but we must not simply use programme-led apprenticeships as a tool for meeting certain targets.
	There are some dangers in the provisions of the Bill. An apprenticeship certificate shows that someone has completed their apprenticeship, but clause 2 contains a real cop-out, in that apprenticeship certificates may be awarded for a whole set of reasons that the Government may, at some time, determine. I hope that those right hon. and hon. Members who serve on the Public Bill Committee will ensure that clause 2 is hammered down, so that an apprenticeship certificate can have the appropriate currency and attain the gold standard, because that is the only way that apprenticeships will survive and become a flagship of the training agenda in the 21st century.

Phil Willis: That goes without saying. Sadly, the hon. Lady has put her finger on a problem that the Government have not fully addressed over the past 11 and a bit yearsnamely, the disparity between men's and women's pay. Those Members who are particularly interested in further and higher education will know of graphic examples of that differential, especially in higher education. The point that she has raised is absolutely right, but that is a debate for another day.

Graham Stuart: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, who pretty well makes my point for me about the irony of the Bill. The Bill recognises the need to separate curriculum development from quality, yet none the less puts a statutory and mandatory obligation on the new agency to deliver all these apprenticeships while at the same checking for quality. Those two elements are clearly contradictory to what I believe can be seen elsewhere in the Bill about Ofqual.

Phil Willis: The hon. Gentleman is quite right. It flies in the face of what the Bill is trying to achieve within schools.
	The hon. Member for Daventry made a fine point about complexityan issue that my Committee looked into in our inquiry, Re-skilling for recovery: After Leitch, implementing skills and training policies. In fact, Madam Deputy Speaker [Interruption.] I am sorry, I mean Mr. Deputy Speaker. That was a very neat change. We had Swedish models earlier and we now seem to have female-male Deputy Speakers.
	When we examined the whole training scenario, we looked at all the organisations currently involved in training schemesfor 14-year-olds right through to adult training. We asked the Department to provide an organogram with everything on it. The Department said, No, we can't; we don't have one. So we asked the National Audit Office and it produced four incredibly complex diagrams for us. In fact, witnesses to our Committee talked about the whole system as
	a pig's ear or a dog's breakfast,
	a very complex duplicating mess,
	almost incomprehensible and so forth. The landscape of this Bill, however, creates yet more complication and yet more structures.
	The one structure that the Bill does not set up is that for individual skills accounts, which I thought were a brilliant way of involving adults in trainingputting resources into individuals to support them. The previous incarnation of individual learning accounts were unsuccessful for a number of reasons, but the principle was right. The principle to invest in individuals must also be right.
	Chris Humphries, the new UK commissioner for employment and skills, told our Committee that something like 67 organisations with skills in their remit wrote to say that it was essential that the commission work with themand he had not heard of any of them. Chris Humphries is, of course, a real star in this area, having worked so hard to promote the skills agenda. He told us:
	Even many of my commissioners have been meeting with ministers, saying, 'you have just made far more complex a system that you have asked the Commission to try and simplify, and that is going to pose real challenges'.
	He went on to say:
	I do not think there is an employer in the land who understands
	the current system, so how on earth are they going to understand a new system with even more complication? I hope that, as the Bill progresses, we will see a real attempt to make it more light touch and also ensure that we have a more simplified organisational structure.
	I raised an issue when the children's trusts boards were under discussion and I want to return to it. There is a danger of casualties resulting from the new legislationin particular the 16 to 19s and the 19 to 24-year-olds who have deep and complex special needs. They have always suffered among post-16-year-olds; it has always been difficult to meet their needs. My greatest anxietyI hope that members of the Public Bill Committee will address itis how we protect their interests now and hopefully enhance them in the future.
	I make no apology for drawing the House's attention to an organisation in my constituency, Henshaws, a society for blind people. I want to put on record my appreciation for what the Government and, more particularly, the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside, have done. The right hon. Gentleman has spent a great deal of time supporting the organisation, which works with people from age 16 onwardsmainly with 18 to 24-year-oldswho are not only blind or partially sighted, but have other complex needs. Many of them are also deaf, for example, and some have physical impairments or other special learning difficulties. They are a really complex group of young people and the Government quite rightly recognised that this organisation, as a charity, needed funding for its residential support. The Government contributed and private donations raised millions in addition to provide for what has become one of the best-performing colleges anywhere in the country. That is quite unique.
	The new arrangements are coming into force in 2010 and funding will change from the Learning and Skills Council to the new Young People's Learning Agency. Sadly, Henshaws will be a casualty. In the interim period, the local education authority takes on responsibility, but it is responsible for fulfilling its own provision first. What we really must not do in the changeover is look for what amounts to the cheapest or most convenient provision. Rather, we need to focus on the highest quality that can be offered. Those young people who have intense needs really require our support. They should receive the support of the House and the Government. My plea to the Minister

John Bercow: The hon. Gentleman's important point underlines the danger of an excessive and insistent localism that specifies that in every case it is just up to the local authority to do its best. Sometimes there are people who have complex and overlapping needs, but of whom there is not a sufficient critical mass to trigger provision. It is for that reason that we need the protective coating of some elements of central regulation or, indeed, funding to ensure that those people are not overlooked, but get the help that they need.

David Chaytor: This is a diverse Bill and the debate has therefore been interesting because hon. Members have brought their own perspectives to it and made many interesting contributions. The Bill is self-evidently full of sensible and pragmatic proposals, and it is hard to see how anyone could object to it, although Members in all parts of the House accept that there will be some interesting amendments to debate in Committee.
	I simply want to support the proposals, particularly on restructuring the Learning and Skills Council. In retrospect, it was perhaps not the right thing to do to form the LSC in the first place, although we must remember the legacy of a series of major bureaucracies with responsibility for skills training that were developed in the 1980s, all of which ultimately failed to deliver. The LSC was perhaps the last attempt to establish a mega-bureaucracy and the lesson is that it, too, did not work as intended.
	I welcome the creation of Ofqual, the separation of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, and the statutory basis given to apprenticeships and to the Sure Start programme, which is one of the Government's great success stories. In particular, I welcome the recognition of the unique status of sixth-form colleges. It is important to remember that about 380,000 of the young people in education are in school sixth forms, but 146,000 are in sixth-form collegesnot quite 50 per cent., but a substantial number. It is my viewI do not apologise for repeating it yet againthat if we had more sixth-form colleges in more towns up and down the country, the overall quality of education would improve and there would be far more opportunities for our young people.
	Post-16, we have the three-part system of sixth-form colleges, school sixth forms and tertiary or general further education colleges, so the issue of funding must be addressed by the Bill. All Members of the House will know that for many years there has been a significant discrepancy between the college and schools sectors. The schools sector has traditionally had a 13 or 14 per cent. advantage in funding per student over the college sector. To the Government's credit, that has been progressively reduced in recent years, but the gap is still unacceptable. The logic of the Bill and of moving responsibility for funding to local authorities, with the support of the Young People's Learning Agency, is that, eventually, we will get convergence of funding for all post-16 students, wherever they study.
	I want to mention also the question of the advice service. I welcome the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh) about the importance of strengthening adult guidance. In this time of enormous economic dislocation, the number of adults seeking advice about their future and about opportunities to train or retrain, or to become involved in further education, will increase. This country has never had an adequate adult guidance service, and this is an opportunity to establish one.
	I want to reiterate in particular the point about clause 35, which a number of hon. Members have made. The clause deals with the responsibility on schools in respect of information about apprenticeships. Although we are not yet considering the Bill in Committee, I want to draw the attention of the House to exactly what clause 35 refers to. The Government's defence is that it puts a responsibility on schools to provide information about apprenticeships. Well, it does not do that. It requires schools to consider whether it would be in the pupil's best interests to receive advice about apprenticeships. That is a fundamental distinction, because there will be a lesser responsibility on the schools.
	That aspect draws attention to what remains a weakness in our structure, whereby it is clearly in the interest of schools to maximise the number of young people staying on beyond the age of 16. There is a tension here that is still unresolved. Unless we get a stronger legal obligation for the provision of advice and information about apprenticeshipspreferably, responsibility for that should not lie within the individual schoolyoung people will still not get fully objective advice on all the options available for their future.

David Chaytor: The hon. Gentleman has made a very important point. I was not aware of that, but it underlines the need for appropriate regulation of the private training sector. We all remember the fiasco of individual learning accounts some years ago, when it was easy for companies to come in and abuse the system. I am a little concerned about the possibility that the impact of the economic slowdown and the increase in the number of new training opportunities for those who have lost their jobs will once again give rise to a less than satisfactory private training sector.
	I want to make a couple of points about issues that are not in the Bill, but perhaps ought to be. The first is the issue of school admissions. The last two education Bills have contained useful and important provisions that have moved the policy forward and helped to strengthen the Government's approach to fair admissions, but perhaps more needs to be done. My clear recollection is that following the recent consultation on the new admissions code, the Government responded that they accepted that the definition of fair banding needed to be revisited so that it was based not on the total number of children who applied to a school, but on the total number and distribution of children within a given area. That is an important distinction. Improving the definition of fair banding would, without question, move us even further along the route of a fair admissions policy. The Government also said that they would seek to make the change at the next legislative opportunity. As far as I can see, this is the next legislative opportunity, and I therefore give notice that I may wish to table an amendment to that effect in Committee.
	The Bill does not deal with primary schools as such. One of the big stories in the last few days has been the impact of the Cambridge primary review, and we all await with interest the outcome of the Rose review of primary education. It seems to me that at some point the Government will have to legislate for changes in our primary curriculum, and perhaps our system of assessment. In his opening speech the Secretary of State did not state, but indicated, that this would not be the final education Bill in the current Parliament. It would be very helpful if the Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills would give an absolute assurance in his winding-up speech that there will be another Bill, preferably featuring a big bang and not just a whimper.
	I found the criticisms of the Bill made by the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove)the shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Familiesrather curious. He did not say directly that he was against the Bill: there was nothing specific in it that he opposed. He spent half his time talking about standards. Of course standards are extremely important, but I suspect that the level of concern about them and the vociferousness with which Members express that concern are related to a wider concern with destabilising the Government, and that in reality the issue of standards is more complex.
	The shadow Secretary of State quoted a number of academics, but did not quote any of our examining boards, although they are clearly best equipped to make judgments about standards over time. As I have said, however, the issue is complex. We are not comparing like with like. The shadow Secretary of State did not take on board the impact of new content and new structures on examinationsthe impact of modular structures, for instanceand the fact that some examinations are now designed to cover a far wider age range. An example of that is the transition from the old O-level to the GCSE. All those factors are relevant to any debate about standards.
	I agree that the issue of standards is crucial, and I think it important for either Ofqual or a contractor to it to have a statutory responsibility to monitor that over time. However, we must draw a distinction between genuine concern and a rigorous analysis over time, and the use of the issue as a bit of cheap populism with which to bash the Government of the day. If Opposition parties use that opportunity time and time again, August after August, all that they will do is undermine the achievements of hundreds of thousands of young people who have worked their socks off throughout their school careers and are achieving better results than any previous generation.
	The shadow Secretary of State argued that, in almost all aspects covered by the Bill and in education policy more generally, we should deregulate, leaving things more and more to the market. He gave the example of Sweden, but I am not convinced that buying a 99p ticket to fly with Ryanair to an airport 40 miles out of Stockholm and looking at a couple of schools is necessarily the best way in which to form an education policy in this country. I also found it curious that the hon. Gentleman cited Finland as one of the highest achieving countries, but did not pursue the logic of his argument by putting the case for the structures and approach to the curriculum that it has adopted.
	Given the events of the last 12 months or more, including the total collapse of the international banking system and the financial services sector as a result of a completely deregulated approach, it strikes me that this is not the best time to argue for more deregulation. There is not a direct analogy between what happens in financial services and what happens in education, skills training, health or any other area of public policy, but the principle remains: we must get away from our obsession with total deregulation, or even light-touch regulation, and concentrate on appropriate regulation.
	In my view, the way forward for our education policy is appropriate regulation and the right balance between coherence, strategic planning and managerial autonomy for individual institutions. I believe that the Bill, with its diverse package of measures, moves us one important step further down that road.

Graham Stuart: The hon. Gentleman has only recently entered the Chamber, so I do not think it would be appropriate to let him intervene.
	The Bill provides a statutory guarantee of an apprenticeship place for young people, but it is a guarantee that carries no definition of what an apprenticeship is, has no mechanism for its delivery, and provides no measures to ensure quality. Instead of legislating, the Secretary of State should be taking the practical measures that will make more apprenticeships available. It is welcome that contractors to Building Schools for the Future will be required to take on apprenticeships in this coming year; it is only a shame that the Secretary of State decided to announce that in the Sunday Mirror, rather than on the Floor of the House today.
	It is practical measures that will provide the places, which are most desperately needed. As my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) set out, the number of people who have had access to apprenticeships has been grossly short of the promises made by the Government, and specifically by the Prime Minister. In fact, there has been a fall in numbers in the past few years.
	The Government have not simply made false promises; they have also used sleight of hand. Government websites announce that apprenticeships have undergone a renaissance in the last decade, yet they have not. All apprenticeships used to be level 3 or A-level equivalent, but the Government have added other, lower-level youth training to boost the apparent numbers. In fact, there are now fewer level 3 apprenticeshipsnow called advanced apprenticeshipsthan 10 years ago.
	A key question is whether the Bill will streamline apprenticeship provision. Far from it. Clause 4 gives responsibility to the chief executive of the new Skills Funding Agencythe SFAto be the certifying authority for apprenticeships. He in turn will delegate that to the new National Apprenticeship Servicethe NAS. Clause 11 says that sector skills councilsSSCsin partnership with standard setting bodies, or SSBs, will be responsible for apprenticeship frameworks. Local education authorities will be responsible for all 16-to-18 education and training, including apprenticeships, yet the SFA is apparently also responsible for all apprenticeships. No one knows how the relationship between the SFA, its agency the NAS, the Young People's Learning Agencythe YPLAand LEAs will work and who will have ultimate responsibility. LEAs report to the Department for Children, Schools and Families; the YPLA reports to the DCSF; the SFA reports to the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills; the NAS reports to both the DCSF and the DIUS. So responsibility for apprenticeships falls between the DCSF and the DIUS. That has the potential to result in a loss of expertise, accountability and oversight, as well as causing waste, bureaucracy and indecision. It is absurd to have two Government Departments overseeing apprenticeships, and equally absurd to have four agencies vying for influence instead of just one.
	How important are apprenticeships? They are more important now than they have ever been, so the Government do at least deserve to be congratulated, as other Members have said, on introducing a Bill in which apprenticeships come at the front and are recognised. There are many areas where we will need a skilled work force in the future, not least in health and social care. In the East Riding there is expected to be a 65 per cent. increase in the number of people with dementia between now and the early-2020s. I did a shift at a residential care home in my constituency a couple of Fridays ago, and saw how hard the staff there work under the great pressurephysical, as well as mentalof providing care for people, many of whom had dementia and others who had suffered a stroke or had physical disabilities. To see those people hard at work and to realise how great the demographic time bomb is in that area is to know the importance of having apprenticeships that will lead people into that sector, as well of having funding mechanisms that will provide them with fairer pay levels.

Graham Stuart: My hon. Friend is absolutely right. He will be aware of the proposals by our party for a transformation in rail policy to deliver high-speed rail from the south to the north, to reduce air travel and CO2 emissions. To deliver that visionon which the Government, as in so many other areas, are belatedly copying uswe will need many apprenticeships in railway engineering, whoever is in government. My hon. Friend will also be aware that the numbers applying for construction apprenticeships dwarf the number of places that have historically been available, and the number has fallen again this year.
	We have had some discussion of standards today, and the hon. Member for Bury, North (Mr. Chaytor) rehearsed one side of the argument with passion. There is august jousting between the parties on this issue, but we need to move on. We can all agree that Ofqual is a good thing, if it acts independently. It needs to provide us with accurate information so that this false battle about the figures can stop.
	Exams now have a different purpose, so we need to recognise that many more people take A-levels than used to do so, and the number going into higher education has increased. An instrument that was designed to measure a small proportion of the population is now being used to measure a much greater proportion and it may need to be retuned in some way. We need a common understanding, not faux battles that help no one, least of all the students who work so hard and deserve praise for what they achieve, rather than having questions asked about the importance of what they have done.
	The head of Ofqual is appointed by the Crown, and all the other non-executive members of the board are appointed by the Secretary of State. Personally, I have doubts about whether that is the right form of governance to foster confidence when so many people have lost faith in the system. It will be worth considering whether we can give Ofqual greater constitutional independence from the Executive. I know that the Chairman of the Children, Schools and Families Committee, who is no longer in his place, would certainly welcome the opportunity to play a part in that, and that might be one way to restore confidence, whoever is in government.
	The Bill transfers all control of 16-to-18 education currently held by learning and skills councils to local education authoritiesa form of localism. There has not been much talk of localism today. Instead of simply abolishing the Learning and Skills Council, which is, as has been said, the largest quango set up by a Government who are so fond of them, or providing a light-touch funding council that would allow most decision making to be local, two quangos are to be set up.
	Perhaps the Minister can explain in his summing up why we are to have two quangos for the price of one. Can he throw some light on the experience that FE colleges will have? Three excellent FE colleges serve my constituency: Hull college, which is in a neighbouring constituency; East Riding college in Beverley; and Bishop Burton college near Beverley. Trying to work out how many organisations the principals of those colleges will have to deal with under the new settlement is frightening. The Government have rightly said we need a simplified system that is lighter of touch and less bureaucratic. We all share that vision, but we cannot see it realised in the detail of the Bill; instead, we face the possibility that a local college in my area will have to liaise with the local education authority in whose area it sits, neighbouring local education authorities and a sub-regional body of local education authorities that will take on certain provisions not left for individual local authorities to deal withalthough they will deal with some things themselvesas well as the YPLA, the SFA and of course the NAS, which members of the Children, Schools and Families Committee may think sounds remarkably like the NAA, a body that had pretensions above its station as a division of the QCA, and helped to lead to the exam delivery fiasco last year. The NAS as a subdivision, with its own chief executive and its own amour propre, could lead to similar problems in that regard.
	The proposal is not a simplification. I do not know whether a fundamental change can be made in Committee, but I put it to the Minister that to make local FE colleges and their principals deal with such a huge number of organisations cannot be right. It does not fit with the vision that Ministers have rightly set out.
	As the appropriate Minister is on the Treasury Bench, it would ill behove me not to mention the importance for East Riding college of moving from its poor, portakabin-laden, cramped, dangerously accessed current premises on the leafy side of Beverley. The college desperately needs to move to the centre of town, close to the railway station and the new park-and-ride scheme, and close to the Swinemoor estate so that it can be a symbol of learning and hope to people on every side of Beverley. I do not want to abuse your patience too much, Mr. Deputy Speaker, but at a cost of just 23 million, after the sale of the current site, the proposed move will have an enormous impact for the money. Compared to many other colleges, the Minister will find that the move will offer regeneration, tackle disadvantage and give hope to isolated rural communities. I recommend it strongly to him when the time comes.
	We have had some discussion of children's trusts. My hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (John Bercow) made a powerful speech, in typical fashion, about his belief that making trusts statutory was the right way to go. With respect to him, I struggled to follow the thread of his argument all the way through. He rightly highlighted the fact that the Audit Commission has pointed out that to date children's trusts have not been delivering as might have been hoped. Perhaps putting hope ahead of experience, my hon. Friend believes that if trusts are drivenI think that was the word he usedby making them statutory and universal and by working up common practice and sharing it, they can somehow be made to work. I fear that they will be great talking shops. If the Minister does not go all the way and force them to have budgets that are used to drive local commissioningif they continue as they are, and people continue to turn up to meetings because they feel that they ought to, but the organisation does not give them the authority to make decisions or allocate budgets for the delivery of goals on which there has been joint decisionwe will continue to have the dysfunction that marks children's trusts today.

John Bercow: Operating in separate silos produces misunderstandings, causes division and is invariably bewildering and infuriating to parents to whose children services are delayed or denied as a result. May I at least put it to my hon. Friend that although there is no guarantee of success, if there is a formal structure, a performance framework through local area agreements, and a responsibility to submit to comprehensive area assessments from 2009, we will have a slightly better chance of getting somewhere than if there was an entirely loose and permissive structure with no formal responsibility?

Graham Stuart: I hear what my hon. Friend says, but I remain unconvinced. Children's trusts need a budget if they are to be accountable as organisations. Parents might think it was the children's trust that was taking decisions locally, but when they came to question things, they might hear that it was part of the health service, the education service or the probation service that had chosen, for its own reasons, not to deliver something that the parent wanted. I remain unconvinced, but if the proposals go ahead, I hope that something positive comes out of them.
	The hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Mr. Willis), who is no longer here, made excellent points about the importance of careers advice. He began to persuade me that we should provide advice on apprenticeships to every child in every institution, because apprenticeships are not just for those who are not academically able. They are a route that can lead to higher education, but they can capture a person's imagination, whether that person is passing exams or not. They are a genuine option, and perhaps the hon. Gentleman is right to say that the advice should be provided for in statute, rather than the Bill requiring merely that the interests of the child be considered. Any school that is struggling to maintain its sixth form will find it easy to consider it in the best interests of the child that they carry on into the sixth form, and do not take up an apprenticeship, although that might be a better solution for them. That is another point that I hope the Minister will consider.
	I should like brieflyI am aware that time is passing byto consider the Government response to a report by the Children, Schools and Family Committee, on which I sit. The report was part of our pre-legislative scrutiny. The Government response says that we questioned
	whether it is a good use of Parliamentary time to consider 'symbolic' legislation.
	If I recall correctly, our thinking was, Don't make a huge, symbolic promise of a choice of two apprenticeship places for everybody if you haven't got the mechanics to deliver. The proper thing to do would be to change the system and encourage employers so effectively that we were able to offer that choice to everybody, and then to legislate to keep it that way. Otherwise there is a danger that when the Bill is enacted, we will have created a promise that cannot be delivered. That would not be to the credit of the Government or any of us in this place.
	In our recommendations, we addressed the issue of the automatic right to progress from one qualification to a higher qualification. The Government's response was:
	We want to ensure that for these young people the route to a higher qualification is clearly set out and that the support they need is in place.
	That is right, but it would be interesting to have more detail on how that will be delivered. Perhaps that issue could be touched on. We also recommended that the Government should not block a young person's
	entitlement to an apprenticeship at the same level as that of a qualification which they already hold.
	I congratulate the Government on listening to that representation and on changing the Bill in consequence.
	In recommendation 10, the Select Committee said:
	We have grave doubts about whether a statutory duty on the Learning and Skills Council (and in due course the National Apprenticeship Service) to secure sufficient apprenticeship placements can be met, or met without compromising on quality.
	The Select Committeea cross-party, Labour-dominated Committeewas absolutely right to say that. That remains a key reason for my doubts about the efficacy of the Bill. The Government response says:
	We will publish a statement setting out how the scheme will operate in practice at the Committee stage of the Bill.
	That will obviously be tremendously important, and I hope that the statement will provide succour to those of us who have doubts about the deliverability of the promise as it stands.
	The Select Committee stated:
	We strongly support the concept of group apprenticeship schemes.
	The Opposition have strongly promoted that idea. Getting SMEs to provide apprenticeships is a great challenge because of the bureaucracy involved. The Government's response was lukewarm, rather than effusive. They said:
	We recognise the key role,
	but they did not say how they would take that forward. When the Minister winds up the debate, it will be an opportunity to be more effusive about group training associations and what they can deliver. If the Government are to deliver the promise that they are making, they will have to use group training associations effectively.
	We heard from the shadow Secretary of State today, in answer to the Secretary of State, an absolutely unequivocal guarantee of support for Sure Start children's centres by the Opposition, and an absolute guarantee that there will be no cuts in the spending on those centres. We can therefore look forward to the scrapping of so much scaremongering leafleting by Labour. Before today, that may have arisen from a misunderstanding, but after today it would be dishonest.
	We differ from the Government in that we recognise that although Sure Start has been a good thing, cutting back on health visitors would be a bad thing. I know that the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke) on the Liberal Democrat Front Bench speaks regularly about the importance of health visitors. We propose to increase the number of health visitors by 4,200a 56 per cent. increase on expected numbers in 2010and to increase health visitor training concomitantly. That gives a flavour of how we will be different. We will certainly not make cuts.

Shona McIsaac: It is always interesting to follow the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr. Stuart), but I will curtail my comments, as I hope to be in the Chamber tomorrow night supporting him when he speaks about the Humber bridge, which is in my constituency.
	A few weeks ago the nation's entire media seemed to descend upon my constituency to follow the protests and the wildcat walkouts at Lindsey oil refinery. The situation was caused mainly by a sense of injustice and anger from unemployed construction engineering workers who saw people being brought in from Italy. They felt that they had the skills and the training to do the jobs on that construction project at the refinery, and what was happening seemed unfair to them.
	Because of that situation, I want to talk about some aspects of the Bill that relate to apprenticeships and training as they impact on my constituency. I have described the situation of increasing unemployment, of workers being brought in from elsewhere and of a potentially toxic skills gap. If we get the Bill right, it will provide us with an opportunity to stop such protests and strikes escalating in the future.
	One thing struck me about the public response in my area to the walk-outs. People would come up to me and say, Look, Shona, why don't the Government bring back apprenticeships? I am probably not the only Labour Member to have heard such comments, because many people have not realised that the number of apprenticeships has increased in recent years. The people making those comments probably remember past mass apprenticeship programmes in the nationalised industries; I am thinking, for example, of the Central Electricity Generating Board, which trained thousands of apprentices. However, in the '80s and '90s, there was a decline in construction and UK manufacturing. Added to the mix were the privatisations and the fragmentation of the markets involved. That led to a decline in the number of companies investing in apprenticeships.
	Yes, there has been a change in recent years, and I welcome it. I have heard snide comments tonight about the value of apprenticeships, but in my area people are doing high-quality apprenticeship trainingfour-year courses in engineering, for example. In North East Lincolnshire and North Lincolnshire, the two local authorities covered by my constituency, there are probably nearly 500 young people doing engineering and construction apprenticeships. They are just the people we need, and they will work on huge engineering projects such as the hydrodesulphurisation project at Lindsey oil refinery.
	As was highlighted by the protests, however, there is a problem. The current itinerant work force, who tour the country working on construction projects and what are called the shutdowns in the refinery sector, are ageing. A lot of them did their apprenticeships in the nationalised industries; after that, apprenticeships withered because of economic downturns. Young people are coming through, but we have a gap in the middle. A representative from one of the oil refineries in my area told me that there will be an estimated shortage of 17,000 jobs in the engineering and construction sectors alone. Furthermore, earlier we heard my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton, South (Ms Taylor) talk about the gap in the chemical industries sector.
	We have to address such problems. Nobody today has really talked about the situation: previous generations who have gone through the system are coming to retirement, youngsters are coming through, but there is a gap in the middle. How will we address it? As we saw at Lindsey oil refinery, one way to address it is to bring in people from Italy; in the past, someone from another part of the UK would have been brought in. A few years back, there was similar upset when people from Teesside were brought in to work in the area. People in Grimsby, Cleethorpes and Immingham asked why the jobs did not go to local people. We have to look at how we fill the gap. There could be merit in having apprenticeships for older people, and not only for those of a younger age, to try to reskill people to meet the skills gap in engineering and construction in my constituency.
	When I talk to employers in my area about skills training and the young people coming through, they say that apart from wanting people to be literate and numerate and to have the high-tech skills that virtually everybody from the age of five seems to have these days when it comes to computers, they want an emphasis on what could be termed softer skills, by which they mean how people behave in the workplacefor example, their punctuality, attitude and teamwork, which many employers feel is lacking because of the education and training systems. All the stuff in the Bill that we have considered is about hard skills such as those in engineeringthere is not much about how to integrate into a workplace, which employers say will be essential.
	A couple of weeks ago, I went to visit a new academy in my constituency, Oasis academy in Immingham, and what I saw there was quite inspirational. Immingham is only a couple of miles away from Killingholme, where Lindsey oil refinery is located. The academy was a marvellous blend of the academic and the vocational. It had car workshops and small engineering workshops. The head teacher placed equal emphasis on the academic and the vocational. I hope that the careers advice in that school will be very strong because of the ethos of its principal in valuing the vocational within an educational setting. We have to do that all the way through the system. We cannot just suddenly say to someone aged 16, Here is some careers advice, and by the way apprenticeships are a really good thing to do.
	I have found that there is a resistance to apprenticeships, particularly in sectors such as engineering. People see those as dirty jobs; they do not value them and there is a resistance to going into them, despite the phenomenal work that has been done in my area by the Humberside Engineering Training Association, among others. I would like Ministers to take on board the fact that we must start valuing the vocational at a much earlier stage in the education system and seriously look at how we deal with the skills gap while we wait for these young apprentices to come through and take on the big construction and engineering projects in future.

Dai Davies: We are coming to the end of the debate and a number of Members still want to speak, so I will be as quick as I possibly can.
	In 1976, I was privileged to be part of an apprenticeship scheme in the steel industry as an electrical engineering apprentice and I saw thousands of people come through the industry at that time. As the hon. Member for Cleethorpes (Shona McIsaac) said, that was done through the nationalised industries, which had recognised training areas. It was a simple process; we have heard today that the proposed process might not be quite so simple. It was a City and Guilds four-year apprenticeship that was indenturedtime-served, as it was called thenwith three and a half years' training and six months' on-the-job experience so that when someone finished their time, they could go out and look for a job having done the job itself. That feature has been lost now. People look at training as an end in itself, but have they had the experience of delivering the service? We need to look at that carefully.
	We have heard big numbers for the amount of apprenticeships, but this is not just about numbers but quality. There is a huge difference between training courses and apprenticeships to gain skills. An apprenticeshipan indentured or a time-served apprenticeshipis much more than just a training course, but there are roles to be played within training courses that lead to apprenticeships. The best engineers we ever had coming through the industry, in my opinion, were those who did an apprenticeship, went to university and came backthey came back on the tools with a degree, rather than the other way around. That is very important in the mechanical and electrical fields, in carpentry and even in administration. Work-based experience is vital.
	There is also a huge role to be played by trade union reps. I am registered with the TUC and trade union reps have a huge role to play in encouraging peopleespecially adultswho have perhaps been out of education for a long time to regain the desire to be educated. Trade union reps have a huge role, as do community learning reps in the voluntary sector. There are huge opportunities and we have not even scratched the surface of them. There is lots of work to be had, too.
	We have heard a little about the shared apprenticeships tonight, and I urge the Government to talk to people such as those in the steel industry, which still has a very good apprenticeship scheme. They should use that experience and pass it on to small and medium-sized enterprises. They could use the industry as a training base. There is also an opportunity for local authorities that own industrial areas to join up the factories on the industrial estates and set up a training centre. It works. We have one in my constituency.
	I also want to touch briefly on sponsored apprenticeships. As the apprenticeship schemes wound down in the '80s and into the '90s, industry looked at how it could use sponsorship to take on extra apprentices. For instance, in my borough council, if 4,000 people paid 1 a week, that raised 4,000 and gave lots of opportunities for employment. The health service employs millions of people. Could we afford 1? I think so. I know that Mr. Speaker has assisted with apprenticeships in this place. If we gave 10 a week, which is not a lot to ask, another group of apprentices could be employed. I think that we should really consider sponsored apprenticeships.
	We have heard about adults coming back into training. When the steel industry shut down in my constituency, people of 35 or 40 years of age had to look for a new trade and a new skill. They could not afford to. How does someone put their life on hold to train? One huge shortage in our area is of social workers. We need social workers. We have shipped them in from Canada, Romania and all across the world. Why not provide our own? There needs to be a sponsorship scheme to do that. How can someone pay the mortgage when they are training for three years? We need to look at that carefully.
	We can identify the youngsters we can help. We have heard about directing them into higher education and apprenticeships, but those opportunities must be available for all. Those who can go to university to obtain certain skills will have them, but we need to encourage other young people.
	We have talked about schools and education, but we should not forget the governing bodies. As a governor at primary and secondary level, I know that the training of governors and their involvement in encouraging children are very important. We have not even talked about governors tonight.
	Finally, I want to discuss two other issues. The first is targeted apprenticeships. We have heard that the construction industry can provide a huge opportunity and we should look at where we can maximise it. There is masses of work out there, and it needs to be done.
	I also urge the two Secretaries of State to talk to the devolved Administrations, particularly that in Wales. There are measures in the Bill that we would certainly want, such as education beyond 16 going into training and apprenticeships. I ask the Secretaries of State to talk to the Welsh Assembly Government. Rather than going through a legislative competence order, which takes time and is administratively slow, we should do what we can in the Bill for the devolved Administrations, too.

Roberta Blackman-Woods: I welcome the Bill and believe that it will further solidify the Government's work on skills, apprenticeships and learning, as well as taking some of the agenda forward.
	I want to mention some of the key measures in the Bill that deserve special attention and to seek reassurances from the Government on one or two points. Let me start with the Sure Start children's centres, which have been a huge success in my constituency and around the country. I am pleased that the Bill will establish them as statutory bodies and will place a requirement on local authorities to ensure that there are a sufficient number to cope with the need in their area. I now have six Sure Start centres in my constituency, five of which serve the ex-mining villages. One thing that I have learned from my many visits to the centres is that Sure Start is a policy for the long term. It is absolutely essential that these centres continue to be funded well into the future. I say that because if we are to go about improving social mobility, we have to raise aspirations among families when children are very young indeed. We not only need to raise aspirations, but to give families support from a range of agencies, whose involvement is necessary when children are young in order to encourage them through school and into higher level education.
	It was interesting to note that when the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) was talking about the future funding of Sure Start centres, he failed to mention one important aspect of the funding: we cannot only fund the centres themselves, important though that is. We have to support agencies and statutory bodies that work through children's centres, which means securing funding in the future for education, and for regeneration in the community, because children have to live in decent housing if they are to learn at school; and we need to fund the health service and primary care trusts at current levels, because children and their families have to be able to access a wide range of health services in the community. I am not sure that I was reassured on behalf of my constituents by the comments made by the Opposition. I cannot stress enough how critical it is that we stick with a policy of investing in Sure Start for the long term.
	I would like to say something briefly about the level of support for local authorities when they take on the responsibility for 16-to-19 learning from the Learning and Skills Council. I welcome that policy direction, but there is clearly a need to build capacity in local government to take on such a role, which is where the rationale for the establishment of the Young People's Learning Agency comes in. However, I hope that the Government continue to review how essential it is to have such an agency in the long term, as local authorities once again build up competence in this area.
	I noted the separation between the ensuring of quality and curriculum development, which is another good aspect of the Bill. Those of us who have served on Select Committees in the past have argued for that, and it is essential, not least because, like everyone else in the Chamber, I am fed up with what happens each August when all our young people, and the wonderful efforts that they have made in passing exams, are denigrated, usually by Opposition Members.
	I wanted to take the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr. Stuart) to task on his use of the information from the Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring CEMat Durham university. I have been to talk to those at CEM on at least two occasions, I raised the points made by the centre with the chief statistician at the Department for Children, Schools and Families, and it would appear that what CEM measures and what the Government measure, with regard to qualifications, the number of people getting them and levels of qualification, are two different things. CEM measures attainment, and we have to make an important distinction. We are not necessarily saying that someone getting an A at A-level today is any cleverer than someone getting an A in an A-level 20 years ago, but we are saying that more young people now have the ability to get an A at A-level because we have improved education so much. It is important to make that distinction.
	I am particularly pleased with the attention given in the Bill to the education of young people in juvenile custody. There are three prisons and a young offender institution in my constituency, so I follow education in prisons closely. I hope that giving local authorities responsibility for education in prison will work out well in practice and follow what happened when primary care trusts took over responsibility for health in prisons.
	I welcome the new reserved powers that are being given to local authorities to intervene in seriously underperforming schools. That matter has not been mentioned much in the debate, but it is absolutely critical for our young people. We are sometimes a bit mealy-mouthed about it and tolerate schools not performing as well as they should for young people in their areas. We hang back until too many young people have had their education either ruined or not delivered as it should be, which affects their future life opportunities. It is important that we intervene as early as possible to turn schools around.
	I welcome also the move to put children's trusts on a statutory footing. Where they work well, they play an important role in producing multi-agency plans and bringing together agencies that are essential to improving children's well-being and safeguarding them. It is important that those trusts and the plans that they produce on behalf of children's services are strengthened.
	The Bill will give all suitably qualified young people the right to an apprenticeship by 2013 and create the National Apprenticeship Service. I am keen for all young people to get adequate information, advice and guidance about apprenticeships in school, and perhaps that could be reconsidered in Committee. That is particularly important in my region, the north-east, because we have 6.5 per cent. of all apprenticeships, a much larger proportion than our share of 16 to 18-year-olds. Of course, that number is vastly improved since 1997, when very few young people in my constituency had the opportunity to undertake an apprenticeship. We now have some wonderful examples such as the Esh Group working with New college, Durham, to provide new apprenticeship opportunities for young people. Just a few weeks ago, I presented an award at New college to the person who had been declared the best plumber in the country at the UK SkillPLUMB awards.
	We need to consider whether apprenticeships are being made as attractive to young women as they are to young men. A huge range of apprenticeships are available, but I am not sure whether the message is getting through to young women in schools and colleges.
	We must pay some attention to the quality of apprenticeships and ensure that employers come forward to provide opportunities for our young people, particularly in this time of economic downturn. I agree with what the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Mr. Willis) said about the need to tidy up some of the information that is available, so that we can check on the quality of apprenticeships and ensure that they are a good-quality project I which our young people are keen to engage. If apprenticeships are to be successful, it is critical that they also meet the needs of employers.
	I know that the Minister for Schools and Learners, who was in his place earlier, is aware of the concerns that have been raised with hon. Members by Unison, GMB and Unite about the establishment and operation of the new school support staff negotiating body. I know that he has set out a response to them, which I hope will address their concerns. I would be grateful for additional reassurances that the unions will have a strong role to play in negotiations on behalf of their members.
	I do not have time to press some of the points that I wanted to make, but I urge Government Front Benchers to take on board representations that they have received from the Federation of Awarding Bodies, which is worried about whether Ofqual genuinely has the power that it needs to secure standards; and from the National Deaf Children's Society, which made important points about SEN and the need for schools with proper acoustics. That is especially important in the context of Building Schools for the Future and the number of schools that are being rebuilt. The Children's Society also made representations, and the North East chamber of commerce urges sub-regional arrangements for the Young People's Learning Agency to ensure that good strategic direction is maintained and, indeed, put in place where necessary.

Kelvin Hopkins: I am short of time, so I shall concentrate on my main theme, which is sixth-form colleges. I greatly welcome the Bill's provisions for them. I have been a governor of Luton sixth-form college for 19 yearscontinuously since the incorporation. I also taught A-level in a further education college, so I know something about the subject.
	I spoke early in my parliamentary career about sixth-form colleges, urging the Government to try to develop more of them. I still believe that that is vital for our future. They are the most successful educational institutions in Britainno other compares with them for success. They do a superb job, but there are too few.
	In 1993, incorporation took sixth forms away from local authorities. Of course, local authorities were never going to establish further sixth-form colleges after that, because it meant giving away the sixth forms in the schools in their areas. Channelling funding through local authorities means that they will be much more likely to create sixth-form colleges.
	It is a great shame that we have had 16 years without the creation of more sixth-form colleges. It has been argued that as many as 50 additional sixth-form colleges might have been created had they not been taken away from local authorities. There are 94, yet there could be 150 or more. We should have that larger number.
	There is no logic to the geographical location of sixth-form colleges, which have grown up in concentrations in Lancashire, the north-west generally, London and Hampshire. There are no sixth-form colleges in great swathes of the country, where young people do not benefit from their undoubted advantages. They are especially suited to larger towns, where they can sustain sixth forms of 1,000 students or more. Sixth-form colleges with high schools that cater for 11 to 16-year-olds are the ideal way in which to tackle education, especially if there is a local FE college.
	The provision in Luton sixth-form college is first classits quality is unchallenged. In Luton, we can provide 44 different A-level courses. Students have an almost unlimited choice, so subjects can be tailored to every student's needs, preferences and abilities. A-levels can be mixed with general vocational courses, and a third of all sixth-form colleges are rated outstanding. Luton sixth-form college gets repeated grade 1s in its inspectionsit is an outstanding college, which has beacon status. Indeed, our local FE college also has beacon status. They are both superb.
	Sixth-form colleges are unparalleled value for money. We have often complained that we are discriminated against, in that funding per pupil in sixth-form colleges is lower than that in schools. However, that is also evidence that they are better value for money. The gap therefore reflects two things: perhaps we are slightly unfairly treated, but sixth-form colleges are much better value for money.
	Comparisons of areas where there are sixth-form colleges with those where there are none in Lancashire and the north-west show that the staying-on rate for post-16 education is higher in areas where there are sixth-form colleges than in those where there are only high schools with sixth forms. Another advantage of sixth-form colleges is that they bring people together from the whole town. In Luton, there is a genuine mix of gender, ethnicity and social class in one institution. They break down barriers that are so often evident elsewhere.
	We also have specialist A-level teachers who devote themselves to their subjects. They do not have to teach subjects with which they are not familiar; nor do they have to teach youngsters in the lower levels of the school. The teachers focus precisely on teaching A-levels and become very skilled at doing so. There are also several teachers for each subject, which means that they reinforce each other.
	There are so many advantages to sixth-form colleges that I could spend a long time waxing lyrical about them. As I said in my speech 10 years ago, they are the educational geese that lay golden eggs. We want many more of those geese. I urge my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Front Bench not just to make the changes proposed in the Bill, but to pressure local authorities to create more sixth-form colleges, because not only will the country benefit, but young people will definitely benefit.

Michael Jabez Foster: I am grateful for the opportunity to make the briefest of comments, particularly as I have not been here for most of the debate. The reason for my absence is that I have been in another Parliament todaythe European Parliament. As a result of the generosity of Eurostar, which has decided to run a service from Ashford from Brussels, it is possible to be in two Parliaments on the same day, although sadly I have missed the greater part of the debate.
	I want briefly to say two things. First, the Bill shows the Government's absolute commitment to skills and further education. It is exciting that it contains so much good. Coming from Hastings, I am fortunate to be the beneficiary of the Government's enormous commitment, with the new 92 million south coast college, which is being built at the moment and which will be operational by the end of the year. That 92 million is 92 million more than the total budget for new build in 1996. I just mention that fact in passing, but that money is an amazing investment on the part of the Government and shows their commitment to skills and further education.
	The other point that I want to make is not a negative one, because I understand from other Members that my colleagues on the Front Bench have already addressed the clauses in part 10, chapter 4 that relate to the setting up of the school support staff negotiating body. The reason for doing so is the high regard that the Government have for support staff, not least because of the increase in numbers, from 134,000 to 322,000, but because of the recognition that they are often not properly paid. Ensuring that they are properly paid and rewarded for what they do is central to the setting up of the school support staff negotiating body.
	However, as my hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham (Dr. Blackman-Woods) said a moment ago, the unions are concerned, although not about how this Secretary of State might use his powers under clause 220 effectively to veto the possibility of a negotiated outcome of whatever is agreed, but about the potential for another Secretary of State to do so. We are not being pessimistic: we do not suspect that there will be any other Secretary of State in the near or foreseeable future. However, should that unlikely event occur, how can we ensure that those marvellous peoplethe support staffare not short-changed if proper negotiations have taken place with their unions in that body, which we all believe is the right thing to do. I should be grateful if my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State could assure us in responding that, at the very least, that veto will be subject to certain regulations, so that a properly negotiated arrangement is not vetoed by those of ill will.

David Willetts: We have had a very useful debate. One of the pleasures of this debate has been that the two Departments that focus on schools and skills, which came out of the single Department for Education, have come together to debate and scrutinise the legislation. In fact, I do not think that we have yet had any legislation since the departmental split that has not been joint legislation shared by the two Departments.
	We share not only an interest in the legislation, but a regard for Lord Dearing, who sadly died on Thursday. His work straddled the world of education and had a big impact both on higher education and skills and on schools. I echo what the Secretary of State said about Lord Dearing earlier in the debate.
	Of course, we welcome some of the measures in the Bill, which is why we shall not divide the House this evening. We welcome the recognition of the need for a genuinely independent regulator in Ofqual. We welcome the new advice on and encouragement of apprenticeships, and the principle of entitlement to apprenticeships. We also welcome some of the rhetoric in the Bill. It speaks of a slimmed and streamlined system, although my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) was right to be sceptical about whether the reality would live up to the weight-watcher pledge in the legislation. We also like the rhetoric of a demand-driven system, but the question is whether that can be delivered in practice. So, those are the reasons why we will not vote against the Bill this evening.
	The trouble with the Bill, however, is that it is an incoherent clutter of a miscellany of measures. It does not provide a sustained argument, or a clear vision of how the standards of schools and skills in this country can be raised. In fact, it reveals the besetting problem of a decaying Government coming to the end of their term: when in doubt, reorganise. When they have lost their ideas and their intellectual momentum, they just reorganise. Even worse than that, they are now reorganising their own reorganisations, and changing the institutions that they themselves created earlier.
	A good example of a Government running out of steam and having to reorganise their own reforms is that of this Government's skills agenda. They inherited the Further Education Funding Council, which they abolished in 2001 in order to create the Learning and Skills Council. In 2008, the 47 local learning and skills councils were abolished and replaced by nine regional bodies and 150 local partnerships. In 2010, the Learning and Skills Council that this Government created is to be abolished and replaced by the Skills Funding Agency, the Young People's Learning Agency and the National Apprenticeship Service. This is an example of endless reorganisation.
	It was said of the French revolution that it finally came to an end when it started to devour its own children, and we now see this Government engaging in a process of devouring their own reforms. I do not know which Secretary of State is the more likely Robespierre, introducing the guillotine only to find himself being sent to the guillotine himself, but this is a Government who are running out of ideas and running out of steam. As a result of these changes, the same office block in Coventry that houses the Learning and Skills Council will presumably house three different quangos and, in the coming months, every official and officer sitting in that office block will be busy applying for new posts and wondering which of the multiple new organisations that are being created they will be working for.
	The hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman), who chairs the Children, Schools and Families Committee, is no longer in his place, but he made this point well. Such a reorganisation would be of doubtful value at the best of times, but we are now, in the words of the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, in the most serious global recession for more than 100 years. Is this really the time for the key agency that is supposed to be focusing on skills and training during the recession to face yet another reorganisation? That is why, although we have no particular brief for the Learning and Skills Council, we have asked the Government at least to suspend the proposed changes for a year, so that the LSC can focus on the task in hand while the economy is in such a mess.
	We have already seen the consequences of the disorientation and confusion that has been caused, with the crisis in capital funding that is affecting further education colleges. I was surprised by something the Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills said in an earlier intervention, when he appeared to deny the existence of a moratorium on FE capital projects. Perhaps I can remind him of what we understand to be the facts of the case. If any of this is incorrect, I would be happy to take an intervention from him. On 17 December 2008, at a national council committee meeting, the Learning and Skills Council suddenly, without prior warning or explanation, cancelled all the national council committee meetings planned until 4 March. Those meetings normally take place monthly. It cancelled the meetings because there was no basis on which it could agree the funding for the capital projects in the pipeline. That is why Members across the House are so aware of the plight of FE colleges, whose representatives are coming to us to express their extreme concern that the capital projects that they had been working towards will not now take place.
	The hon. Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh), who is no longer in her place, made an extraordinarily loyal speech in which she raised a question about her own FE college, which seems to be facing a capital funding crisis, despite the fact that the Secretary of State has already told the House that there is no such thing. If even the ultimate loyalist has had to accept that there is a crisis, I was surprised that the Secretary of State could not bring himself to do so.
	All this is part of the wider problem with the Bill. The biggest single group of losers from it is, I am afraid, FE colleges. Those crucial colleges are, as we all say, the Cinderellas of the education system, but they do an enormous amount and have special qualities: they educate people across the entire age range; they educate people across a wider range of social classes than any other educational institution; and they link academic and vocational study. We believe that they should be set free as community collegesfree to serve their communities in the way they think best.
	Instead, the great achievement of 1992, when those colleges were given freedom from local authority control, is to be reversed in respect of 16 to 18-year-olds and those colleges will face a multiplicity of quangos financing and supervising them on the education they provide to over-18s. That is not what FE colleges want and I do not believe that local authorities understand the range of responsibilities of those colleges or how they work.

David Willetts: FE colleges certainly want the freedoms that we gave them in 1992 and they certainly want to engage with local employers, but the question is whether the extraordinary muddle of quangos that they will now have to face17 regulatory bodies, as identified by Andrew Foster in his inquiry, set up by the Government themselves to look into the amount of hassle and bureaucracy encountered by FE collegesis the best way of helping them.
	I was about to tell the Secretary of State how badly my speech at the North of England Education Conference went this year [Interruption.] I thought he would be interested to hear what an uncomfortable experience it was for me. I turned up to give a speech about the educational agenda as it looks from the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills perspective. I spoke about careers advice, access to universities and the future of FE colleges, but it was clear to me that the concerns of the audiencepeople from local authorities and children's services, for examplewere completely different. They were concerned about the baby P case; they were concerned about the future of social services for children; they were worried about the primary school curriculum and testing. The agenda I was talking about was clearly of very little interest to the representatives of children's services.  [Interruption.] It is possible that that was entirely the result of my speech, but I believe we are also observing the fact that children's services simply do not get the 16 to18 agenda, which is so important for so many people in this country. The Secretary of State is going to find out that those services will not be capable of supporting FE colleges in the way we want.
	FE colleges need to know some basic facts, which I still believe the Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills has failed to explain. I hope that he will take the opportunity to answer these questions when he winds up the debate. We have had a draft Bill and two Select Committee reports on this legislation, yet the Select Committee has still been unable to establish answers to certain fundamental questions.
	What, for example, is to be the funding arrangement for further education colleges under the new system? Will it be funding per student, funding by block grant from local authorities or funding from individual local authorities? How will the new sub-regional structures work? There are FE colleges that have a dozen or more local authorities sending students to them. They still do not know the basis of the funding structures that will face them in a year's time. I hope that the Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills will address that issue in his winding-up speech.
	Let me discuss apprenticeships. The aspiration in the Bill is admirable, and we want more people to know about apprenticeships and to have the opportunity to do them, but I am not at all clear about how the Government will deliver their claim of an entitlement for every learner who wants an apprenticeship to have a choice of two within reasonable travelling distance. There is the assumption there that an apprenticeship is generic, but people do not want any apprenticeship. They want to study a particular course and to take particular training; they want to become electricians or plumbers, rather than do an apprenticeship.
	Nevertheless, I hope that the Secretary of State will tell us a little about how he sees apprenticeships functioning in the new environment. He appeared, yet again, to be surprised when we quoted figures from the Government's own statistics on what has been happening to apprenticeships. We follow apprenticeships in the sense that most people in this country understand them level 3 apprenticeships, which are the equivalent of A-levels. That is what apprenticeship used to mean before apprenticeships were redefined so as to cover a much wider range of training.
	On the Government's own statistical release, the figures are clear and the number of level 3 apprenticeships has been falling year after year. In 2006-07, it was down to 97,000. We are suspicious when the Government announce targets, where they achieve them by redefinition or fiddling the statistics. I would like the Secretary of State to assure the House that he will continue to collect the statistics showing the number of people, on average, participating in level 3 apprenticeships. Those statistics have been on a continuous downward trend since 1999 and the figure is now below 100,000.
	For most people, level 3 apprenticeships are what apprenticeships should be like, which is why we heard an intervention from the hon. Member for Cleethorpes (Shona McIsaac) about why people in Cleethorpes are asking where the apprenticeships are. Level 3 apprenticeships are disappearing and, instead, training courses are being redefined as apprenticeships. That is what is happening. Youth training schemes, which were dismissed by the hon. Member for Wakefield, would now be called apprenticeships and count towards the Government's target.
	The House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs said:
	Numbers officially 'in apprenticeship' have increased substantially since 1996.
	That is what Ministers like to say, but the Select Committee continued:
	However, as Figure 1 below shows,
	that is the table
	most of this increase has been as a result of converting government-supported programmes of work-based learning into apprenticeship. Since 2000, numbers in apprenticeship have increased by almost 20 per cent. although growth now appears to have slowed or stalled and numbers in Advanced apprenticeship have fallen.
	The graph is absolutely clear: the so-called growth in apprenticeships is level 2 apprenticeships that did not even count as apprenticeships until the Government came to office. That is the simple explanation of what is going on. If the Government are to try to achieve those objectives, we need their assurance that they will not achieve them by continuing to redefine the target. That is why the latest danger is that they redefine it through using public sector apprenticeships.
	I was encouraged by the comment that I heard from the Secretary of State, but let me remind him of what the Select Committee on Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills said during its scrutiny of the Bill in draft. The Committee was concerned about what it called conversions and was trying to establish the fact that apprentices should be new recruits, not existing employees
	who 'convert' from their current jobs to apprenticeships with the same employer.
	I very much hope that the Secretary of State will offer that assurance and clarify, as the Select Committee asked, whether conversions to apprenticeships within the public sector will be counted as achieving the Government's target.
	We support the Bill's objectives, but very much doubt whether the Government can be trusted to deliver them. They are once more reorganising when they lack vision and once more redefining apprenticeships, rather than encouraging them to grow. They are presiding over an increase in the number of NEETsthose not in education, employment or trainingwhen Members on both sides of the House wish to see it reduced. They are not committed to genuine adult learning, where the number of places has fallen catastrophically. Those are the points on which we shall challenge Ministers as we scrutinise the Bill in Committee.

John Denham: It is a pleasure to reply to the debate. I apologise to my hon. Friends and to Opposition Members if I cannot respond to all their comments in detail.
	A wide range of issues has been raised. My hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool, South (Mr. Marsden) emphasised the needs of older apprentices, as did my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes (Shona McIsaac). Let me say to the hon. Member for Havant (Mr. Willetts) that it is important for us to create new opportunities for young people to undertake apprenticeships. I reject the idea that an apprenticeship is an inappropriate way for someone to learn halfway through a career, and I reject the hon. Gentleman's apparent view that anyone who learns in that way should not be counted as a proper apprentice. That is simply wrongyet it is the position of those on the Conservative Front Bench.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West (Mrs. Hodgson) spoke of people with special educational needs. She should be congratulated on her remarks, and on her private Member's Bill. The hon. Member for Buckingham (John Bercow) also referred to that important issue. There is clearly a strand of concern throughout the House about the need to ensure that apprenticeships can reach the widest possible range of young people. The hon. Member for Daventry (Mr. Boswell) raised similar issues, as did a number of others.
	The hon. Member for Blaenau Gwent (Mr. Davies) and othersincluding the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Mr. Willis), who chairs the Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committeespoke of the importance of quality in apprenticeships, which lies at the heart of the Bill. My hon. Friend the Member for Bury, North (Mr. Chaytor) and the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough spoke of the importance of careers advice. My hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman), the Chairman of the Children, Schools and Families Committee, also spoke of the need for quality in apprenticeships.
	It is clear that this has been a good Second Reading debate. I understand that there will no Division tonight. There is broad agreement on many parts of the Bill, which must now be subjected to detailed consideration in Committee. However, although it is always welcome when there is cross-party agreement on a number of clauses of a Bill, I should stress that the House must not be misled by the apparent agreement on many of the clauses into believing that the Opposition and this party stand for the same things, or believe the same things.
	Today we have seen a concerted attemptand, in particular, an attempt by the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove)to suggest that there is only so much difference between the two parties on many aspects of the Bill. We began with a discussion about spending. Spending is very important to our ability to implement many of the measures in the Bill, and the hon. Member for Surrey Heath made it very clearhe could not have been misunderstoodthat there was absolutely no question of his party's not matching, pound for pound, the full amount that the Government will spend on the budget of the Department for Children, Schools and Families.
	The hon. Gentleman said, I think, that he had shot my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State's fox. He said that we were misinterpreting the circumstances, and that we had misunderstood the remarks of the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) when he spoke of Conservative budget proposals. That is unfortunate for the hon. Gentleman, because I happen to have a transcript of the question asked by Mr. Andrew GriceI believe he is a newspaper reporteron 5 January at a press conference held by the right hon. Member for Witney. Mr. Grice said:
	In the past you have promised to match Labour's spending on education, today you use the word 'schools', does that mean you would spend less than Labour on other areas of education such as universities and skills?
	The right hon. Member for Witney replied:
	It means that the school budget specifically is the one that is protected in terms of their plans.
	There was no mention of Sure Start centres, or any other part of the DCFS budget. The hon. Member for Surrey Heath has completely contradicted the leader of his party. The fox which, a few hours ago, appeared to have been shot dead is now alive and running around, and is coming back to snap at the hon. Gentleman's heels.

John Denham: Whatever is the case, the Opposition are in some confusion on this issue. The hon. Member for Surrey Heath said he had inadvertently deleted a letter from my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families asking about the schools budget, so let me remind the hon. Member for Havant that he has yet to reply to my letter asking where the 610 million that is going to be cut from the DIUS budget from 1 April under his party's plan will come from. The House should know, because this legislation is very important. We are making legislation today, rather than deciding on budgets, but the reality is that the ability to make anything of this legislation, and in particular to deliver the quality apprenticeships that so many Members have spoken about, depends on spending, and the Opposition are simply failing to come clean on these issues.
	The hon. Member for Surrey Heath was also keen to express support for Ofqual. He said he wanted no part in any argument about dumbing down, but he then quoted every single authority he could find to claim that exam standards have fallen, and he did not quote a single one that believed the oppositealthough my hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham (Dr. Blackman-Woods) gave us a healthy corrective to ways some evidence can be misinterpreted. I have to say that during the hon. Gentleman's speech I myself began to worry about the standard of maths education. I have not discussed this with my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, but I did feel that we should, perhaps, introduce a compulsory new question to the A-level maths syllabus. We should ask students to identify how many ways a Tory spokesman can misuse statistics on apprenticeships in the course of a single debate.
	Let us have a look at the record. We have heard a number of times the claim that there are fewer advanced apprenticeships than a decade ago. The hon. Member for Havant wrote to his colleagues on 19 February saying that the number of advanced apprenticeships has fallen to just 97,000. That is not a figure I recognise, but let us be clear about this. The Conservative party never used to bother to find out who completed an apprenticeship; it never took any notice of that. What is the truth? In the first year for which we have statistics for the completion of advanced apprenticeships, 18,400 were completed. In the last year for which we have statistics, 36,200 advanced apprenticeships were completedtwice as many people completing advanced apprenticeships under this Government than under the previous Government. The number of people starting advanced apprenticeships rose by 29 per cent. in the last full year. That is the truth about advanced apprenticeships, and it is a disgrace that the Opposition seek to misuse and selectively quote figures in order to try to make a case that simply does not stand up.

John Denham: What the hon. Gentleman needs to understand is that what mattersthis is very importantis the number of people who successfully qualify in an apprenticeship. When the hon. Gentleman's party was in power about a quarter of peopleif thatever completed an apprenticeship. The completion rate is now up to two thirds. That is why we are successful. Not only are more people starting apprenticeships, but more people are completing them, and they are completing them at level 2 and level 3.
	The hon. Member for Surrey Heath said that the Prime Minister had not met his target of 500,000 apprenticeships. Well, that is a bit challenging, because the target is for 2020. The hon. Gentleman knew that when he quoted the figure, but why let a decent fact spoil a good misuse of statistics?
	The truth is that the Government have rescued apprenticeships and they are now well on their way to their rightful place in the mainstream of our education and training system [ Interruption. ] The number of starts has gone up. The hon. Member for Havant cannot say that it has gone down. He does not understand the statistics and he should look at what matters. The number of people starting apprenticeships has gone up. The number of people completing apprenticeships has gone up. Those are the key facts that matter.
	The measures that we have announced todayan additional 21,000 public sector apprenticeships and, in total, an additional 35,000 extra apprenticeships over this yearwill take the total number of people starting apprenticeships this coming year to more than 250,000, and that takes us further forward. So does this Bill. It does what the House of Lords Committeeon which served three former Conservative Chancellors of the Exchequer, as well as my noble Friend Lord Layardrecommended, by establishing a National Apprenticeship Service. That proposal has been treated with derision by the Opposition as an addition to the quangocracy, but the House of Lords was right. If we are to make a real success of driving apprenticeships forward to the next stage, we need a dedicated service, able to support the careers service in schools that so many people have talked about; able to support employers; and able to work on the support for the group training associations that I happily and effusively support, as I was asked to do by the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr. Stuart).
	The Conservatives reject the advice on apprenticeships given by the House of Lords Committee dominated by members of their own party. It does not do the Opposition much credit to have made the concerted effort that they have, today and on other days, to rubbish the achievements of this Government on apprenticeships. They would do much better to acknowledge what has been achieved. There are debates to be had about how we should proceed, but instead they appear to want only to denigrate everything that we propose.
	An important part of the Bill for my Departmentit has hardly been mentioned this eveningis the introduction of the right to request time to train. That is a new right at work that will cover 22 million people, not only those with lower levels of skills. It will directly address the problem in those workplaces where skills needs and training are not regularly discussed. It does mean that people will have the opportunity to identify their training needs and employers will have to respond to a reasonable request to give that time off.

Graham Allen: But does my hon. Friend think that the opposition of the Conservative Front Bench and elsewhere is rather exposed by the fact that no Conservativeseither on the Front or Back Benchesare in the Chamber? Perhaps it is too late for them.

John Heppell: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that question, but that does not surprise me at all. In some respects, others should not be interested in the issue because it is something for the people of Nottingham; it is not for the regional CBI, or the regional or national chambers of commerce. People in Derby, Leicester, Manchester and across the country can forget about the scheme; if it does not work in Nottingham, I guarantee that nobody will bring it in anywhere else. Nottingham city wants to bring in the scheme and, to be quite honest, we would appreciate it if people who are not involved in Nottingham city kept their oar out.
	The economy of greater Nottingham is the largest in the region. It is worth more than 11.2 billion and employs more than 300,000 people. Congestion in Nottingham itself costs 160 million a year and half that cost falls to business, which has been on to me for years and yearsI am sure the same is true for my hon. Friendsaying, When are you going to do something about this congestion? That is why the first tram appeared in the city.
	The problem has gone on not just for years but for decades, since I was a county councillor, and that is one reason why I am an advocate of public transport. It is not that I am anti-carI want to use my carbut I realise that if we all use our cars at once, the roads will be so crowded that it will be a waste of time. I want people to have the choice of using public transport when they can.
	The reality is that in Nottingham, 70 per cent. of congestion at peak time is caused by commuters. The proposal tries to address that. It looks at where the biggest problem lies. It is not, as some suggest, an ill-thought-out idea that has been put together on the back of an envelope. The city council has been looking into the matter for years. I can remember considering what we would do about the problem when I was a county councillor. The city council thought about road pricing, too, although perhaps not in as detailed a way as people would have liked. It rejected that, and came back to the idea of the workplace levy.
	The workplace levy is attractive to us because of its simplicity. It is low-cost; it is simple to introduce; and it fits in with the timetable for other transport measures, such as phase 2 of the tram project. The levy is targeted specifically at commuting drivers, who are considered to be the main contributors to congestion. It is a scheme that fits the bill for Nottinghambut perhaps not for ever. I think that there will come a time when we will want to do something more sophisticated with fancy technology. However, that technology is not there yet, and the levy fits us at the moment.
	The view has been expressed that the scheme is not about congestion, and that annoys me. It is suggested that it is just a stealth tax that the council has decided to introduce, and that it will not help to ease congestion at all. Again, nothing is further from the truth. The scheme deals with congestion in every respect. Let us look at what it does. It works on the same basis as other environmental schemesthe polluter pays. If a company has no workplace parking spaces, it will not pay any money. If a person never uses a workplace parking space, they will never pay any money. If a company has workplace parking spaces, they will pay for them. If they have more, they will pay more, and if they have fewer, they will pay less.
	What will employers do? Some of them will decide, Let's get rid of some of these car parking spaces. Great! That will mean fewer people travelling to the free spaces in the city, and fewer people using their cars, which reduces congestion. Some tell me that it will not do that; I am sure that it will. Alternatively employers will pass on the charge to their employees. They will say, Okay, you've got to pay the charge. It is not much; it is 70p a place, which will not break any banks. However, if they pass on the charge, at least it will make people think, Perhaps this isn't the way I should be travelling to work. Perhaps I should use some other form of transport, if that is possible. If they do, that will reduce congestion, too.
	The main point is that all the money that is collected is hypothecated. The Government and the council will get nothing. In fact, the councillors are among those who will have to pay the workplace parking levy for the parking that they use in the city centre, which is effectively free. I do not think that many people in Nottingham will mind the fact that the councillors will have to pay.
	I want to dispel one of the arguments put forwardthe argument that the levy discriminates. Part of the campaign has involved trying to enlist the unions, and people have said, This is terrible. It discriminates against shift workers; it is really bad for them. Well, they have picked the wrong person to argue with if they want to argue that point with me. I started working shifts in the pits on my 17th birthday. I worked shifts for almost all my adult working life. Until I became a politician, I worked shifts all the time. In industry, when I worked shifts, I did not have a car. Nobody had a car in those days. We did not come to work in a car; we had the pit bus. It picked people up along the routeseven, eight, 10 or 12 miles away from the pitand dropped them off at work. That is much more environmentally friendly than everybody driving there in their car.
	Things have changed, but when I was a shift worker at Toton diesel depot, not everybody got there in their car. Some people did, but everyone who went in a car picked up two, three or four other people on their way to work. There was not a parking space for every single person who went there. Some places in the cityBoots, for instanceseem to have a car space for every two employees. If we take shifts into account, I suspect that they have more car spaces than employees.
	That is not all; when I was a shift worker, I resented paying a pound, or whatever it was, each week to the man who used to give me a lift in his car, so I got myself a bike. I did the Norman Tebbit thing; I got on my bike, and I cycled to Toton every week, and cycled back. When I became really prosperous, I ditched the bike and bought myself a Honda 50, and travelled to work in style and luxury. After that, I did not always use the Honda 50. Sometimes, when I became even more prosperous, I used the car, but only when I had to. Most of the time I still used the Honda 50. It was cheaper, easier and got me around. Part of the problem now is that we are not giving people choice.
	As I said, the money from the scheme will be hypothecated. It will provide Link bus services so that people who do not want to use their cars will be able to take a bus. The money will pay for new bus services, among many other things. Some of usI do not know whether that includes my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Allen)were taken aback by the recent flourish of opposition to the scheme. I thought there would be no more arguments about it, and that the people who were against it would shrug their shoulders and said, Well, it's going to happen anyway. Let's forget about it. I was surprised that the opposition has been resurrected.
	The scheme is not something new that has appeared out of the blue. Nottingham proposed it in 2000. It was part of the city's transport plan for 2001-02 to 2005-06. It has appeared again in the present transport plan. It is built into the package of transport proposals. It is nonsense to think that if something is taken out of the package, the rest will still stand. That is not how it works. Most of the transport proposals had the workplace parking levy built into themfor instance, the redevelopment of Nottingham's railway station. A new hub at the railway station is expecting to get some money from the workplace parking levy. If there is no levy, there will be no hub.
	Improvements to the city Link buses, which join up hospitals, universities and key employment sites, will not take place if there is no parking levy. The most important thing, to me, is the tram. Everybody has accepted that that is part of our package. Perhaps another funding stream could be found quickly, but I suspect not. I suspect that that would probably knock our application for the tram back a year or two years. Who knows what could happen in these times?
	Nottingham express transit phase 2the extension of the tram systemwill join up 1,270 workplaces, to which 45,000 people commute. What a difference that would make to the city of Nottingham. There are a further 600 workplaces in Beeston and Chilwell in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Broxtowe (Dr. Palmer). His patch would benefit as well.